drawings, panels, drawings

so the project that has been consuming all of my awake and quiet moments (which are rare, but they do exist) is the drawing series that i've been broadcasting across my store on etsy, my table on poppytalk and in my modish ad. when i started to draw again, early this year, i found myself filling my sketchbooks with my usual web-like drawings. pages upon pages....doodles upon doodles.

i started to play around with the drawings in illustrator and photoshop, to clean 'em up a bit and discovered a whole new world of toys with the new adobe suite. unbelievable tools, things that just make a girl giggle - and probably a boy too. now it is important to state, if i haven't already done so somewhere else, that i NEVER thought i would be working digitally. i am a dirty hands on kind of girl and that's the way i've always been. i also say NEVER all too frequently, as i almost ALWAYS end up doing just what i said i would NEVER do. ALWAYS. my husband laughs and secretly loves it, though his initial response is irritation. he loves it. so i never would have thought that i would use photoshop or illustrator for anything more than designing cards, fliers, etc. now, i'm hooked. i can actually create drawings similarly to the way i made drawings with ink, encaustic and pigments. the results are almost identical - minus the texture, and the need for a nice big open space to create such works. which brings me to my next minor point about my limited studio space right now.

since the birth of the z, who will be 4 in october, my studio has gradually gotten smaller and smaller, to the point of which it's at now. i've got a collapsible system in which i build tables pretty quickly when i need to work on the panels. i laminate and trim the drawings at the dining room table, and when they're ready for filing and sealing i return them downstairs and then prep them for finishing. it's a multi-step process, which works out well with the space i've got. one day i will again have a nice little private space . but for now, i'm doing the best with what i got and fortunately cj is keeping the computer technology working perfectly.

so back to the process: each final drawing includes anywhere between 3 and 7 layers of drawings. all of which are the same ink drawing - actually the drawing i use is cropped down a part of the original larger drawing - more abstracted. a tool i always loved to introduce my beginning drawing students to was to take a slide mount and use it to crop down what ever subject they were using to draw. i apply the same principal to my own drawings, though i use a digital marquee that is always proportionately the same throughout each replicated version.
Here's the Acumulated Propagation as it becomes Preciptous Retreat:

this is the original drawing

same drawing, but the black lines and white spaces are colorized

this is the cropped image from the top part of the original black and white

this is the first collage of the previous images. the colors and lines are tweaked, deleted and enhanced with adjustments to the opacity

and again, a variation

and finally...Precipitous Retreat.

so that sums it up. i am hoping to do a few more of these because i think it's good for my own reference - and of course i'm thinking about years from now, to look back and see what i was making and how.....