SPENT

 Here's something I've been working on the last week or so for myself. It's an image I've been thinking about and working on sporadically for a while now.

  Because this was for no one else other than myself I decided to load up the image with a lot of visual information, introducing elements that may appear to be only tangentially related to the main elements. I should mention that it was initially inspired by a piece by Ed Rushca.

  I've always been attracted to this images graphic simplicity having said that I wasn't at all interested in slavishly replicating it. This may seem odd being that the piece I've done is anything but simple, even the version where I did simplify it, there's still much more going on. I really just wanted to use it a spring board  for the piece I ultimately ended up with.

 Once I thought I was finished with it I showed it to a couple of friends who also happen to be an illustrator and animator. They both had very helpful if somewhat annoying suggestions.
At first I was a bit put off by them because I thought I was done with this piece and ready to move on. But once I got a bit of distance I could see what they meant and I had to address them.

One of my friends felt strongly that the rocket babies and the tentacle coming out of the bucket in the bakgound were unnecessary and only distracted from what he thought was the central idea of the drawing.

Photoshop is a blessing and a curse because it makes it fairly easy to make these types of changes and what can happen as a consequence of that is you can arrive at a point where you're not sure yourself if the piece is even finished. I suppose the upside of this is you can inadvertently end up with two similar yet very different pieces.