I was asked by my old friend Santa De Haven to take part in a show she was curating for Artspace with the theme of Love Gone Wrong. She has paired 10 short stories by local writers with images by 10 local illustrators. I very rarely do work for galleries and I rarely get assignments where I'm asked to illustrate short fiction. Once upon a time having illustrators provide images for fiction pieces was fairly common place, not so much anymore, so I was more than happy to be a part of this.
I was given a Story titled The Wedding Horse by Angela Apte. After reading the story I immediately jotted down a couple of quick very rough thumbnails just to get an idea of what my approach would be.
Nothing too realized, just some visual short hand to get me going. Then I collected what references I thought I'd need and worked up a tighter drawing.
Once I felt like the piece was coming along I tightened it up further still.
It's generally at this stage where I would then begin inking the drawing but since this wasn't for a client I decided to try something a little different. I wanted to keep the rough unfinished feeling of the pencils so I played around with Levels-Adjust and then worked back into the drawing in Photoshop.
In order to create the sense of atmosphere I was after I took some graphite dust from my pencil sharpener and an old brush and applied the dust to a sheet of paper and again played around with Levels-Adjust until I was satisfied with the overall texture.
I then assembled the texture and the drawing and began the coloring. My intent was to keep the coloring simple and mostly confined to the line work. In this piece I was much more interested in the quality of the pencil work and not so much the quality of the painting.
Santa told me that the writers will be reading their stories at the gallery Sat. Feb. 11th. I'm not sure of the time but if you're interested contact the gallery.
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