On the heels of an interesting email conversation about finding and developing a personal style or artistic voice, I took a good, hard look at my own work and its straight-forwardness. When contrasted (and contrast is the correct term here) with works I’m attracted to, it became clear to me that injecting intentionality in my drawing process would be a Good Thing for me.

The above drawing arose from the prior blog entry. This is the wonder of digital drawing: one can save a new branch from the main tree and explore it simply by saving a new file and making changes. In this instance, I attempted to extend the curled branches into the rest of the drawing as well as reducing the background to a simple colour field.

Know that this process was very challenging for me: I went through hundreds of tree shapes before using (giving-up?) with the half-circle; I like the colours but find them out of tune; I resisted all attempts to change the robots and the dogs (something I really should change); and struggled to drop the Law of Accurate Form for whimsy and playful forms.

Work continues on the ‘Robots Treed’ composition that I began earlier this November. For the most part I’m quite satisfied with the tree and the robots in it (although I intend to draw in more robots). But the green scale used in the foreground and distant hills is still unsatisfying to me. Turns out, finding the right six-step sequence of greens (which go from a vibrant foreground to a dulled background) is harder than it looks.

It’s Sunday, I’m feeling under the weather but still willing and able to sit down and do some in-jammies drawings and doodlings. I’ll capture screenshots throughout the day and see what can be shared.

Working on a tree (above) for a larger idea featuring my robot colony and a number of noisy, neighbourhood dogs. Watched (listened rather) to an episode of Stargate SG-1 while drawing this. I know a number of artists will listen to CBC radio while working – what do you listen to for your productive moments? Let me know.

And here, working on the robots themselves. My goal is to define their appearance so that they can then be used in a variety of works: shape, style, articulation and then colour.

Robots in a tree. I’m still not sold on the final design for the robots, so I’m leaving them unfinished for now. I’m also looking for the most time-efficient way in Inkscape to colourize a group of vectors. Currently, I need to recolour each individual object. I’m hoping for a layer- or object-based shader… we’ll see.

Added shadow details. Still a long way left to go – but I’m thankful for the productive day. Oh, and am feeling a bit better than this morning.