Sometimes when I’m tired or feeling down I find it hard to be creative or motivated to do anything. I typically call this apathetic feeling, “no soul.” I was feeling this way shortly after I had purchased my Intuous Pro. I decided to force myself to be creative and I made this piece that says No Soul. I don’t write graffiti in real life, but I’d imagine I’d write this if I did. The Intuous Pro came with a demo version of Autodesk SketchBook Pro so I decided to try my hand at it. I started with just the glossy letters, which I’m very happy with:

(Click for Larger)

For the glossy letters I had the following ideas in mind. First, I wanted the main strokes to be wider on the bottom-right portions of letters, and narrower towards the top-left portions of the letters. I also wanted the letters to come in and out of the foreground. I wanted each letter to have near-parts and parts in the distance. Lastly, I decided the letters should interlock where their near-and-close parts overlap. The fill I painted and smeared with various brushes in SketchBook Pro, and finally added 2 layers for the glossy high-lights and the sharp specular high-lights.

At this point, I decided I wanted to push the drawing further, so I added valves and some kind of mysterious vapor emitting from them:

(Click for Larger)

Although I used the paint tools to make the gas clouds, I did not paint them like I would for traditional media. I actually painted them solid and changed the various blend-modes for the layers of clouds. I also erased part of the clouds so fore-ground bits of the letters appeared to cut through the fog.

The last idea I had for this project was to put a slightly warped and shaded brick wall behind it.

April 6, 2015 at 5:38 am | Art