Pine Cone Mountain

I designed this drawing as a Christmas greeting image. As we will see below, it is a lesson of planning and letting go for me.

Process

I began with the idea of winter holiday. After some thoughts, I came up with two requirements:

1. a set that immediately conveys "winter holiday" to the audience and
2. Maggie and Faito are in the drawing.

My solution was to give them a magical place that they visit in their adventure. The place will have snow to give the winter feel. Conveying the idea of holiday was harder.

Thumbnails I drew for planning

I drew the first thumbnail with the idea of showing Faito being so happy and excited. I reinforced this with a Christmas tree in the second (yes, there is a creature head at the top of the tree that we may or may not see in the future--I have not made up my mind) and third thumbnails.

At this point I felt that I need to research more ideas for Christmas holiday symbols. (I usually researched ideas using Pinterest. You can see the images I collected in this "Ornaments" board.) One idea I liked was using a pine cone as a Christmas tree.

Pine cones are small, though. How do I explain a giant pine cone tree? Well, why not make it even larger? A Pine Cone Mountain! And so I arrived at the final idea.

As I drew the huge pine cone in the foreground, I realized that it may not be immediately recognizable as a pine cone because most of its parts were out of frame. In the final image, I added a pine cone in the background as a visual hint. I also added giant Christmas ornaments to reinforce the holiday theme.

So far so good. Except it was already Christmas when I started coloring. Pressed for time, I neglected planning for colors and values. I simply tried out color combinations and went on coloring. The result was quite far from what I wanted.

Lesson 1: never skip color and value planning.

I finished coloring just in time for the new year 2017:

Happy new year, everyone :) Wish you all a good 2017. #newyear #holiday #drawing #illustration #colorpencil #adventure #dennyisk #pinecones

A post shared by Denny Iskandar (@dennyiskart) on Jan 2, 2017 at 7:00am PST

I could have let it go and moved on, but I did not. I thought I could fix the color and values digitally, so I put in more hours to edit the image. The further I worked on it, the more I realized that I was spending time unwisely. In the end, I simply made the background lighter and added simple gradients.

So, lesson 2: let go a finished drawing.

Time is better spent planning for the next piece and working on the next piece.

As always, let me know your thoughts and comments.

Welcoming the Year of the Rooster

Happy Lunar New Year!

The last two months saw three major holidays packed close to each other. Lunar new year is the last one. I want to draw something nice as a greeting, so I spent longer than usual on this piece.

Designing was surprisingly easy. I knew the rooster would feature prominently because the new year is the year of the rooster. Seeing stylized, abstracted imagery of rooster gave me the idea of a fiery, perhaps imaginary rooster in the background with Maggie and Faito floating in the foreground.

Coloring was more difficult. I still need to practice more with color pencils to control values. I deliberately chose non-traditional Chinese New Year colors (that is, not red). Fortunately, it is easy to find such color schemes in Singapore. (See these examples for an idea.) So I thought of including pink, yellow, and green.
During execution, I was caught in my fascination with the pleasant sequence of red, orange, yellow, lime green, and green. This sequence fills most of the rooster. However, roosters usually have dark tail feathers. My solution was ending the sequence with cyan, sky blue, and blue. I admit the result is perhaps too much, but I think I kept them in some degree of harmony.

(Ah, on hindsight, perhaps Faito's clothes should have been closer to blue.)

Let me know if you enjoy finding out how I worked. Please don't hesitate to tell me what you want to know more so I can include it in future posts.

Reflecting on Inktober 2016

Recently I posted mostly drawings I did for Inktober 2016. In this post, I am reflecting on how I did during the month of October.

Late September, I began with the thought of just trying out something new. I wanted to know for sure that I could consistently produce finished drawings with quality I would be happy with. The situation became a bit complicated because I made a hasty decision to leave a job at the end of September. I would find myself constantly struggle to strike a balance between job hunting and drawing.

Still, I did commit to develop myself as an independent artist. This gave me a drive that was surprisingly strong; I was surprised to find myself drawing even though I was also looking for a job. This gave me interesting experience I would not get into otherwise. For example, I penciled the background trees for "Noisy" while sitting on a public park, waiting for a job interview, and finished inking it at the Business Canteen (The Terrace) at National University of Singapore.

I also decided that I would focus on creating a world for children of around primary school age. On that age, I was reading comics like Smurfs, Johan and Pirlouit, and Steven Sterk. Even though I don't remember much of the stories, the adventures and fantastical worlds formed an impression on me. I would like to draw stories like that--evergreen stories that generation after generation of children will enjoy.

So I made Maggie and Faito to be around three head tall. They started quarreling like children. And they now walked a more idyllic world (tough arguably I broke this rule in "Sad"). I do not know where this will lead me to, but it will be interesting to explore.

At the end of my Inktober 2016 run, I learned that I could produce more than I usually did. However, this meant I took time from other things in my life. I learned that this is what other people meant when they mentioned "sacrifice".

Related to this, I found involving my wife in my routine helped smoothing things a lot. Before this month, we allowed each other to drive weekend activities as weekend was unfolding. At times this caused unhappiness because one of us could not do what we wanted.
Now that I am committed to finish a drawing, I usually tell her in advance that I need some time to draw on the weekend. This would trigger a discussion for tighter weekend planning. This process actually made us feel closer to each other.

Looking forward, my plan is to draw in themed series. For example, I will group the Inktober drawings as "Maggie and Faito Series" with their adventure as the theme. I am currently drawing a "Film Portrait" series, starting with "Dr Strange".

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