435 - Art as a gift

note: this entry's longer than I thought, grap a cuppa, it's 1,233 words long.

As announced in post 432, I'd resumed making art, both for the sake of art, and for a therapeutic goal of self expression, and personal growth. 

In that entry, I explained a few background factors about my struggles with self esteem and my rare usage of art as a form of self expression, due to those struggles. 


In the process of making the quirky bird hybrid of said post, I felt that I was actually developing new skills in improving my coordination between the model I see and what I was able to draft and then finalize as a sketch and a painting. The result included both a quirky looking creature, made on purpose after following Willowing's video already linked, and also some more realistic looking items such as the Tolkien sigil. 

I found myself growing confidence enough to try another piece, that was a personal decision, not based on any video, but the wish to offer a piece of art to a friend who was struggling. I started sketching several of the elements of things that define her, or her likes, such as foxes and cacti, or her gender identity and activism.

This was a more time consuming process as I wanted to include quite a few elements, and had to learn how to draw them to the best of my ability, when I'd only done a few of them in my previous project, with very new skills that I barely got to use. This time, I wanted something both funny and real enough, but not made to be wonky-looking on purpose as the bird project was. I had to be patient, to include - 14 of the elements that I wanted - whilst learning how to sketch each, over the course of several days, as you can see in these scanned drafts, starting with foxes, mostly faces, which I started as early as 2nd of June, adding Robins, Cacti and a few quirky elements on the next day, and on the 4th when I actually started sketching and painting, I also added my attempts at simplified Welsh dragons after looking at several cliparts as the flag itself seemed beyond my capacity - finding out that my current skills aren't enough even for the simplified version, so I ended up using the Welsh motto instead. 

I didn't feel my skills ready to do better than the draft squirrel face either, nor even her real life dog, to whom I felt I couldn't render justice at present... (scroll for the rest) - some of the scans aren't as visible due to where I drew on the page, having to fold the sketchbook and how well the scanner can see. 

So, I drew the first few elements, and veered away from one of the cacti being the quirky bit as I had first envisioned in my draft ; I chose the robin to wear the hat instead of the cacti, and on my wife's suggestion, to carry a small flower in his beak. She also suggested that I add the fox's thought bubble and the bigger pride rainbow, and to use the same watercolors, as I hesitated about my abilities in making it even, and I'm so glad to have follower her advice as it turned out quite even after she showed me the technique with the brush, and more cohesive in colors than I could have done with the markers I'd used in my draft. 

The first scan of the painting I finished  on the 5th of June included a pink ribbon, as my initial research for cancer survivors yielded this result, but during a further research on Cancer Survivor day itself (June 7th) when I was working on this blog's entry 433, I found out that pink ribbon wasn't simply for any cancer, but specifically for breast cancer, which wasn't the one she survived, so, with my wife's advice and help in layering the pink, we turned it to the proper color : purple, seen in this second scan of the finished piece : 

I chose a funny and basic looking fox, seen from the front, adding the Startfleet communicator on the front, where the fur is white. This time I included the fuller version with the star within, and the painted yellow portion, as I hadn't done in the previous project. 

I included two cacti, one with the leafy V for my friend's veganism, and the gender queer icon with the gender queer flag's colors on top of the second cactus - colors that I included again in the second Star Trek element, the Live long and Prosper hand sign, seen on top of the Welsh motto, Cymru Am Byth, which roughly translates either as Wales Forever, or Long Live Wales... see what I did there ?  I also painted these words with the Welsh flag's colors. 

The sequence of which element is on top of the other resulted more on the relative sizes, not on any particular order of importance, just a comical situation in which my imagination saw a robin, standing on top of a fox's head, wearing a hat (my friend rocks the hats!), the hat itself morphing into the gender equality icon and lgbt rainbow colors above. The flower was going to be a separate element, much like the cacti and icons, but upon my wife's suggestion, given to the robin to carry and offer to my friend (does that make me an incidental robin?) 

I sent my friend the HD versions of the color scans, and plan to send the physical piece after the covid19 situation alleviates enough for snail mail to pass from France to the UK, and for her to receive it safely. 

The therapeutic portion includes expanding my skills further, as each was made by observing various images on my phone, and sketching them, first as drafts and then  onto the final piece, painting during the same process when I thought I was done and found myself adding further, so from this I learn it's better to first sketch everything that I want to be included, and thus  avoid bleeding colors and graphite, which I should erase more often than I do. 

Despite some lacks in my skills, I learned new ones, drawing and painting things I'd never done before, improving, overall, what I was doing from draft to final version.

After all this, I also learn to better use my scanner's abilities and to edit the image both in windows image views (especially for cropping), Gimp to better showcase the true colors, and Fast Stone Image Viewer for resize when needed - such as for this blog. 

Care, love and support for my friend drove me in a patient process of making this entire piece, with a tiny bit of help, but a huge majority on my own terms and speed, for which I was proud and happy to make my friend feel cared for and to bring a smile to her face. 

For those interested in making art, the tools I used : 
outlines first drawn with a mechanical pencil (also used for all the draft sketches), and retraced over with a 0.2mm Staedtler black liner for most cases, but, in other instances I used Stabilo 0.4mm fineliners in the color of the painting when needed (such as the purple ribbon), 
Caran d'Ache Neocolor II water-soluble colors,
A White Posca pen (used only for the dots in the cacti)

and an A4 watercolor paper