anika mari

So many ideas popped into my head for the Heavy Metal theme from the Creativity Boot Camp. All of them involved actual metal things, from anchors, to gears, to jewelry. Perhaps all obvious interpretations of the theme, but at this point I’ve decided to be more committed to the process than to having a unique idea for a jumping off point. With a little luck, in the process of creating the drawing, perhaps something unexpected will evolve, as I’m happy to say happened as I was working on this theme.

I decided to go with chain as the imagery for this drawing. Luckily I live in a house that literally has everything, so when I needed chain, I got chain. I found a big bucket full of various weights and styles. Some was really rusty and some was super shiny. I settled on one in the middle; a heavy weight chain that was a little weathered, but still had some shine.

As I was working I decided to flatten the drawing, and not focus on the shading. The fact that it was a bit shiny comes into play later. The first step was to get the outline of the shapes in place.

I had to really push the contrast of the image so the lines were visible, so it’s a bit grittier than it really was. The most fascinating thing I experienced when drawing the chain was how the shapes and lines intersected in unexpected ways. When it comes to certain shapes, like chain, I have an idea of how it’s put together, and if I didn’t actually look at real chain, I would draw it in an entirely different manner. Working from the real thing, I was able to take my time and examine how a bundle of chain really looks. I guess that’s the fun part of all drawing, but I found it particularly satisfying with this subject.

Originally I thought I’d use gray marker and do some shading to bring out the shapes and show the depth of the chain, but after I had the outlines set, I remembered that I had some metallic pens. Now I’m thinking gold would have been fun to use, but at the time I only considered silver.

The silver marker was very opaque, so it covered over all of my faint graphite lines. I admit I was surprised by how different the pattern looked without the defining outlines that showed the individual links. I could still tell it was chain, but it was so much less obvious. I liked the flatness, but I really wanted to see the shapes of the links in the chain, so I re-drew the outlines.

I’m amazed by how different it looks with just a few slightly darker lines. At this point all I had left was the background and I was torn between using a bright hot pink and a dark gun metal gray. I went with the pink.

The scan is definitely a lot more muted than the original. In person the silver is incredibly shiny and the pink is super bright, bordering on florescent, and the combination of the two almost makes the drawing unsettling look at. I decided to use photoshop to adjust the colors a bit to see what it might have looked like with the gray background.

Since I don’t know what the gray would have actually looked like next to the overly shiny silver, I’m not really sure which I like better. Do you have a favorite?

As I was working on the chain drawing, one of the things I started to think about was the shininess of the metal, and how in general, that’s an inherent quality of metal. I took a moment to look at the chain differently, focusing only on the highlights. That’s when I had the idea to draw a version of only the highlights.

Again, I had to boost the contrast a lot to get the outlines to show up. I decided to forgo the silver, and instead use the gun metal gray I’d thought about using for the background of the first chain drawing.

When coloring in a background of a pattern with prismacolor markers, I have to work as fast as possible to achieve a smooth finish. If the “edge” of the marker line dries, and you color over it again, that edge will show through. As long as you can keep the edge “wet,” you can blend the color and avoid variations in tone.

It’s hard enough to achieve this with larger patterns, and I found that with such small shapes scattered all over the paper, the task was almost impossible. Not to mention the fact that by working so fast, I wasn’t as careful as I should have been around the white shapes, and ended up losing some of the detail.

After trying, for a few minutes, to make the background smooth, I noticed that an uneven background would actually compliment the jagged shapes pretty nicely. I slowed down a bit, and stopped attempting to get a perfectly smooth background, which probably would have been nearly impossible anyway.

I’m very pleased with how both drawings turned out. The pink and silver chain drawing is a fun, bright pattern that was very satisfying to work on. The mottled background of the highlights drawing was the perfect solution, and I’m happy that as I was working on the theme, I did indeed come to a unique solution with unexpected results.

The next theme is “grow,” but I’m not sure I’ll have time to work on it today. Lots of other Sunday stuff to do. So much for getting caught up over the weekend. I’ll just keep working at it, slowly but surely.