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Sachi Swick
Digital Painting Design Narrative
I was looking at the work of Alfons Mucha and decided that I wanted to attempt to draw
something in a similar style. I was kind of in a swooshy, swirly mood anyway, so art
nouveau kind of worked out at the time. However, while I was looking through Mucha
posters, I decided that they consisted of far too many pretty women, and thus I was
determined to make the subject matter something really gross and ugly. I considered
using a Persian cat face, road kill and even slaughtered meat, but eventually I settled on
the potato bug. There was a specific Mucha work that depicted a bunch of peonies with
swirling stems and leaves. I liked it because the stems were very thought out and almost
geometric, so if I were to do something similar, I could experiment with flower stems to
make my work look more graphic.
After drawing a bunch of thumbnail sketches, I decided to draw elements that I knew for
sure would be in my piece. I could later move around those elements in Photoshop to
experiment with composition. Drawing the potato bug was difficult because I don’t know
the anatomy of a potato bug, and I didn’t have the right angle of what I wanted in my
reference photos. I had to improvise with a lot of it. I’m kind of obsessive, so that was a
little distressing for me. But it seemed to work out – as long as an entomologist doesn’t
look at it, I’m good. After that I was drawn out, so I traced the flowers and just made sure
to give the outermost edge a thicker outline, because that was a common detail in
Mucha’s works. While placing the images in Photoshop, I decided that I liked the look of
the bug exceeding the box borders. I wanted to make the stems look like they were
almost continuous from box to box, and that they flowed together. I also tried to make
sure my flowers were relatively balanced on both sides of the bug.
After I had everything drawn out the way I wanted it to be, I cleaned up the line drawing
in Photoshop, printed it out, cleaned it up again with a black colored pencil and added
shading with a blue colored pencil. The picture was scanned back onto my computer, and
then I added the color. I originally had a red and green color pallet, but then messed with
the hue at the end, and found a different color pallet I liked. I also added texture in the
background with some splatter paintbrushes I had downloaded a while ago.
Overall I’m pleased with the end result. This assignment helped me to explore color in a
way I’m not used to. I tend to fill my artwork with really bright, almost garish colors, and
I kind of like the more subtle effect I have with this piece. The thumbnails and constant
sketching was also new to me, and all the planning definitely helped me to produce a
more thoughtful composition. I think I still need to fool around with more texture in the
painting, I feel like there isn’t quite enough unity between the hand drawn qualities, and
computer produced qualities.
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