Wednesday, September 20, 2006

A Dose of Color



I'm not sure how I feel about this one. It was drawn at the bar (I'm beginning to notice a pattern here) so there was only candle light to work with. It was also drawn on a manila folder with (to start) a blue sharpie. Suzy had some markers behind the bar, the waterbased Crayola® brand style, so I brought in some color. It's pretty crazy and in regular light it looks totally different than I expected. I guess in general, it's difficult to render shapes, shadows and highlights of a dark composition while starting on white (manila) paper. On the flip-side this is not really about rendered, realistic shapes, it's more of an illustration.

The bar (foreground) was made of wood but I had no idea how to render it. I didn't want to color in areas of the drawing that necessarily corresponded to the "real" colors of the surface (what is reality? what does it mean to see? what is perception? bla, bla, blah). So in the end I just threw in the color at random. I kept the main wall one color and did a cross hatching thing that I spotted in some drawings by Hope Gangloff (she has a show up in Chelsea right now, check it out). I was hanging out with people so I was partly paying attention to the drawing and partly focused on the conversation. In the end I think this helped because it prevented me from becoming too paranoid about what was happening to my drawing. I think sometimes I'm too protective of a sketch, to the point where I become really tense in order to avoid messing it up or making a mistake.

I think I made a few mistakes with this drawing, but I'm OK with that.
-peter-

3 comments:

Peter Hamtramck said...

test!
Peter

tps12 said...

That's awesome. Interesting how the part you started with (that voodoo stick thing on the left) you sort of left as a contour while the rest got fleshed out more.

Peter Hamtramck said...

Yeah, I kinda lost interest in that section of the drawing, it was pretty dark in the corner over there.