I started this piece so long ago that I don’t actually remember when, but it was finished before the end of last year. I started the drawing when I got a new set of off-brand illustration markers, which came with three gray tones. It became my experiment with color and combining technique that informed all of the art that I worked on in 2020.
Here’s the physical drawing, as it sits in my portfolio, freshly scanned just for this post:
I wanted to express the quality of the landscape where I live – which can seem like almost uniformly flat meadow, with the sky looming over in big stacks of cloud. The figures show up like Macbeth’s witches, mysterious and alarming, with their hair flaming against the drama of the sky. The colors I envisioned for the background were grays, but especially the green-grays of the atmosphere before an electrical storm.
Since I needed a wide assortment of pastel markers to tint the drawing the way I’d like using traditional methods, I leaned into the fact that it was already such a mixed media piece by finishing painting the drawing using Photoshop.
Eventually, I had captured something of the Polychrome, dreamlike weirdness I had imagined.
This is one of five images in my first series of finished work, now for available for sale at my Society6 shop! It’s available as an open edition print on paper or canvas, framed or unframed, starting at $19.99 for an 8 x 10″ size. More of the images in this series to come – along with more sketchbook fun – are coming up really soon.