"Winter Deck Seat"

An obstinate ol’ timer insisting on his traditional table at the now-shuttered Sourdough Sam's restaurant, long a local fixture in the community. (link to previous post) Instead of knocking out a panel every few hours or so as per my average, this one pretty much took all day of on-again/off-again attention. First I doodled out the idea in my sketchbook at a café early in the morning. It was only after hitting it up with a wash and then adding lots and lotsa little dots with a white ink Gelly Roll pen that a lightbulb moment occurred. It became a visual link connecting a concept with another incubating idea. As of late I’d been tangentially inspired by random imagery from artists who depicted snowy scenes with using maybe 10-20 times the usual number of flakes that I typically employ in my winter work. I mean, we’re talking like a curtain, a veritable blanket. For weeks I’ve been mulling it over, chewing over the creative cud while wondering “I wanna find out some way to do that.”

So then after a few hours of office work, I returned to the studio, and penciled the design out on Bristol board. Another couple hours of errands, and I was able to return to the drawing board to ink everything in, then let it dry, then erase the underlying sketch, scan it, and email myself the tif. Back at home, approximately twelve hours after the initial idea in the sketchbook at the cafe, I opened up the file and commenced to clean it up and make some minor tweaks for editing. After the prepwork, in itself several hours of cleaning up and refining, then began the preliminary digital coloring. The trick was to keep saving it at different stages: the line art; the flats; and finally one with all phases of the experimental mega-dots done in separate layers. They needed to convey a random uniformity, a paradoxical pattern that would both function as a texture with its own presence in + over the piece, but still see enough of all the other elements throughout the composition ie leave visual breathing room. You can see some playing around with several differing levels of relative opacity of the flakes on the test wash in the sketchbook. Because this, in conjunction with the value shift with foreground flakes being comparatively brighter/higher contrast, size is another depth cue that deliberately distorts density of the dots, thereby enhancing atmospheric diffusion. Okay now I’m flaking out.

No but wait, not done yet: turned out 24-hours later, on the morning of xmas eve, I realized that the final layer of flakes ought to be made individually, each shaped by hand so as to avoid the “made by computer look.” Even if they were in fat made with Photoshop, as opposed to the Gelly pen and/or white-out applied with a brush (my usual manual method). So after a coupla hours layering a flurry, it’s finished. Still didn’t quite push the envelope as far as my inspirations, but it’s not like I won’t have another chance to “see what happens.” Also what’s funny in retrospect, now that I went through this I looked back at previous snowy scenarios, and they now all suffer in comparison. As in feel empty, unfinished and primitive compared to the new winter wonderland.