"Endsong" Demo: Macro Texture Swatches

It occurs to me that back in December I teased out a mention about a brand-new studio course I developed for the drawing department, "Pen & Ink," and since then have never posted any samples of the incredible work that's been produced in the class. I'll catch up over the upcoming break, but in the meantime here's a sample of a demo page I did during an in-class exercise.

Students were tasked with sampling from the semester's work to date and recreate macro textures onto twenty approximately 2" squares on a sheet of Strathmore 500 series Plate Bristol. So a super slick surface meant rendering with superfine tools like crow-quill dip-pens + o1/02/03 Microns. 

The words were sampled & remixed into the panels after the sample textures were randomly rendered, with only one frame specifically designed for an accompanying image ("It's all gone"). Somewhat similar to last year's comics poem of a Lamb of God + Gudetama demo page,  the inspiration for the text came from one song in particular, "Endsong," off the first album released by The Cure in sixteen years, "Songs of a Lost World." Other reviewers have done introspective, insightful reviews on this masterpiece of melancholia, but for me it means more than the usual nostalgic navel gaze: a mutual favorite band (along with Depeche Mode) with a long-gone dearly loved family member who we would often share mixtapes of adolescent longing. The faint penciled sentence reads: "and if you  think a fifty-something year-old man who still listens to The Cure is sad wait until you see him lose it over a new song of theirs (first in sixteen years or so." While I'm not a goth per say, it can look somewhat funny to see someone of my age not only singing along to some classic hits, let alone crying at how hard the lyrics hit. I mean, at his age when he sings about such things as loss and sadness, he really fucking means it now, which I can deeply relate to now more than at any other time in my life. To me it's simply their best song ever.