SketchCrazed – surreal, lurid, unzipped

SketchCrazed is an opportunity for me to share the very strange drawings I do, cloaked in this transparent attempt to give them a sense of purpose and intentionality. But you’re probably not fooled! The common thread is in the attempt to explore new relationships of form, contrast, and pattern, and to see where they take me.

A little STAIN on a saint, a little SAINT in a stain

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© @mrsomebody

I don’t know where these ideas come from. The drawing was progressing as I drew light pencil lines of things. I draw a little, I read a little, I drink more coffee. At one point I’d misread the word saint as stain, and then realized it made no sense in context. But as I thought about it I felt that maybe there is a symmetry going on here. There is probably something saintly in a stain (Leonardo DaVinci paid attention to stains). And I am sure some saints had a few stains on them as well. So that was my big insight for this drawing.

After the coffee I met a friend of mine who has since moved to Guinea, West Africa and had twin daughters. That has nothing to do with the sketch, yet it does indicate that sketching imbeds impressions of what was going on at the time. I can’t separate the two. This drawing always reminds me of my friend.

After I finished this drawing I scanned it and brought it into Photoshop where I added the color and textures. I used the drawing as a mask, punching a dark pattern into it. Then I created a second level of gray shapes that I added behind it. The original drawing is on the left, and you can see the layers I created for coloring on the right. (the color layers are turned invisible here)

surreal, lurid, unzipped

Thanks for checking out this SketchCrazed post. Please follow me at @mrsomebody and comment your thoughts below!