Three Drawings

Over the last few months I've been working on some drawings for a friend. As you know, most of the commissioned work I've done over the last four or five years were portraits. Not my most favorite thing to work on, but it's good practice and what lots of people like. This time I was actually doing illustration...you know, what I majored in? It was an interesting experience, and it reminded me how much harder it is to create what someone else has in their head, rather than just interpreting a portrait of a little kid. I was also reminded that I really need to work on my planning stage when it comes to art...something I was told in school but often chose to ignore.

My friend wanted me to do some drawings of some of his family's stories, which he was then including in a binder of said stories that he had written up himself. I wasn't actually given a copy of the stories to read over, just a lined piece of paper with some rough drawings of what he wanted, with the idea that I would ask for specific details as I needed them.

The first drawing I completed allowed for the widest interpretation on my part. The family had lost a cat during a tornado, then several days later the cat reappeared a little bedraggled but okay. From that day on, the cat was terrified of the tornado siren in town, and would scramble for cover every time he heard it. So the idea was to draw the cat visiting Oz during the tornado; he wanted the cat in a tree, and the quartet from the movie, but the composition and background were pretty much up to me.

The hardest part was portraying the cat, because my friend just wasn't very specific about what it looked like. All I knew was that it was short haired, gray, white, and mostly black. I figured it was a cat something like this (after searching for cats on google with those colors). Since I had no idea what kind of facial marks it had, I chose to draw it facing away from the viewer, so it was more likely the family would see it as their cat.

The biggest things I don't like about the drawing is the apples (they were an unplanned last minute addition that I could have placed better and drawn better) and the tree in front of the cats face. The whole reason I wanted a sunset sky was to highlight the cat, and then I put a stupid tree right in front of it. Yeah...bad planning. Also, the colors in its ear are the same as the sky, so where the tree meets the ear is visually confusing. If I were to draw this again, I would move the tree far to the left (so the cat's head was completely in the sun) or far to the right so the whole cat was silhouetted. Ah well.
The sky, cat, and some of the details are colored pencil, the rest is markers; 11x14".




11x14" Prismacolor marker and pencil



The next drawing is of a real place the client remembers from childhood, and there were a few elements that were important to get right, like the relative ages and coloring of the kids, the fishtank, and the bird in the cage. Everytime I thought I hd all the details I needed, I'd realize some other part that I didn't know (what hair colors? Did the girl have short or long hair? Would she be wearing a dress back then?) and I'd have to contact them again.

 This memory involved my friend (the youngest boy in this picture) and some of his siblings visiting a pet store in their youth, where they would relentlessly tap the fishtank, even though it had a prominent sticker that expressly forbid that practice. They also fondly recalled the minabird that would greet them every time they came.

For this drawing, I had to look up pictures of fish, snakes, dogs, mina birds, and cages. Even though they look fairly simple in the drawing, I haven't had much practice drawing animals and having a visual reference of somekind helped my drawing greatly!I already knew how to draw turtles, as I'd owned a few in my youth and drew them all the time.

I also looked at a lot of Norman Rockwell drawings of kids, becuase I was thinking of that tall gawky style for the kids in this drawing, especially the big ear part. In my head I was picturing a dimly-lit, dusty petstore, and everything was in shades of brown and yellow, like an old photo. At the same time I wanted the fish to be bright and colorful. So to compromise these two ideas, I ended up doin the warm light coming in the window wit the warm yellows and browns, then of course the color in the foreground. I tried to tie the two together buy having the same colors in the shirt to the far left, so it didn't look like two seperate drawings.

For the most part, I like how this one turned out. The shirts, back wall, floor and window are pencil, the rest is marker.



11x14 Prismacolor Pencil and Marker



The final drawing is the one that took the longest. This is mostly because I was unsure of what exactly it was supposed to look like, and instead of people or animals this was solely about the specific place: a roadside park in South Datkota. The actual place is no longer in existence, so there were no pictures to look at, and the little sketch I was given wasn't that exact either:

Everytime I thought I could start drawing, I'd realize I needed more information. What kind of trees are there? (No pine trees, unlike what the drawing would indicate..)Are they young or old?(Mature but not huge) Sparse or thick? (sparse). What kind of landscaping is there? (just natural grass). How many picnic benches were there? What did the outhouses look like?(they were important to the story.)
Originally, I was planning on wooden outhouses with a crescent moon, but no, they were to be metal with a man and woman icon on them. All the metal outhouse photos I found online had flat roofs, but they were supposed to be peaked. I was going to draw them white, but they were metalic colored too.

The hardest thing to figure out was the waterpump. He kept trying to describe it to me, how it had a drinking fountain integrated into the design, but I just couldn't picture it. And for some reason I couldn't find one on google images either...for weeks! Until one day I must have entered it differently in my search , because suddenly there were a handful of photos right at the top of the page! The best ones were copyrighted flikr pictures, so I just drew some sketches while looking at the screen, though I did find a couple I could print out. They all looked pretty much like the same thing, so I felt safe in thinking this was what he meant. This is what they look like, if you are as confused as I was:

Thse photos alll were taken in Minnessota, so I wonder if this was a regional thing? Hmm.

 Finally I thought I had enough info to finish the picture, but I was still hesitant about a lot of things (my source was out of town for a family emergency while I was working on this, so I didn't want to call them a bunch about it.) I didn't know what style of picnic benches to draw, so I was kind of making them up (which I shouldn't have done; they'd have looked so much better with a photo reference.) I wasn't sure if the background went off into the distance like it does around here, or if there was a town nearby, or even hills.

So I started out planning three layers to the drawing: the park itself, then a slight hill behind that, then a vague background layer which I would fill in later. I did the grass the way I see it around here; not manicured, full of clover, bushes, and weeds, etc. As I was working on the drawing, I got impatient to see how it was going to look, so I colored in the background yellow just to see what it would look like. I'm always stupid when I'm impatient.

Almost immediately after I colored it in, I realized I would rather have the sky come down further, eliminating that third layer completely. Mostly this was because I'd pictured a sunny day with a bright blue sky (because the other two drawings did not have blue skies) and the strip of sky being so narrow made the scene seem claustrophobic to me.



first version with a yellow background



I finished everything else in the drawing while I thought about what to do to change the background. On a seperate paper I practiced covering up the yellow with different things, and finally decided I could maybe cover it with a combination of my blue sky marker and some colored pencils. I was annoyed because I had wanted to do this drawing completely in marker and pen with no pencil, but it wasn't going to happen.

At first it seemed to be working. First, I'd cover the yellow with blue marker, then white pencil, then blue pencil. It seemed okay, if a little dark. I was sad about it looking dark, becuase that meant it wasn't going to be the bright blue midday sky I had been planning on.



fixing the yellow hill, trying to make it like sky



However, when I had completed this technique all the way across the drawing, I could see that it actually hadn't worked that well at all! there was a very obvious line between the blue and the "fixed" part, even though I had attempted to kind of blend them together with another color. I started adding some purple to the scenery at this point, since the bright colors in the grass and trees wouldn't look right with this darker sky:

The easiest thing to do right now would be to just color the rest of the sky with all those same colors to make the rest grayish, but I really didn't want the sky the same color as the two main elements of the drawing: the pump and the outhouses. The most complicated fix (that I was hoping I wouldn't have to do) would be to completely cut off the sky and put a different paper behind it. Way too much trouble.

About this time I looked outside and saw some pretty pink clouds in the eastern sky, stretched at an angle over a bruised blue and purple backdrop. Maybe this would work for my drawing? I figured with the pink and blue it was a different color than the other sunset in the Oz drawing, plus the angle might disguise the line where the edge of the yellow had been. So on the spur of the moment, I scribbled some clouds over the sky. In the dim evening light it looked pretty good, but iin the morning I could see that it looked like what it was: last minute and sloppy. But I knew I could use this begining idea to finish the drawing.

In the end, I used the pink and blue, adding the colors to the other things in the drawing (like the buildings, the pump, the table, etc) so that it looked more put together. I also decided to quite trying to just hide the yellow; instead I actually added some so it would look deliberate. This miraculously trasformed the sky from looking sloppy, dark,  and half finished, to looking bright and mysterious. I finally liked it! This was the final drawing I gave my friend:



11x14" pen, marker, and colored pencil.



In the end, this last drawing that I had worried and stewed over so much, really turned out nice! It was fun to have something to work on.