In the latest round of practicing my illustrating technique for the sexiest dictionary, I disassembled my home office. Totally worth the sacrifice. I had no desire to sit at my work desk on the weekend. Instead, I relocated my work computer and monitor to the living room, so I could paint while the TV entertained me.
Since the monitor couldn’t reach the outlet, I used an extension cord. I doubled the cord and wrapped it up from the middle in order to have the two ends free. To keep everything in place, I wrapped the bundle with one of the many pieces of cloth that live on the shelf in my closet.
Using a larger and different type of paper, I taped it to the monitor with all the other lights out, and quickly traced the outline. In order to be more efficient, I’m only going to disassemble my work station on the weekends since I’m not going to reassemble it until Sunday night.
As I predicted, better paper improves blending. The paper still wrinkled a little. And as I blended, the paper wore away.At least I didn’t make any holes.
Yet the most glaring critiques are the lack of contour shading and their facial expressions. Their mouths are either too big or too small as if I don’t want them to speak the truth about their paralyzed faces or other inadequacies of my painting ability in this medium.
I’m going to be more mindful of those things moving forward. Also, as much as I’d like to save paper, I’m going to need to print out the images. I don’t need them to be full size, but I need to look at the contouring and subtlety of their expressions. I don’t want to fool with signing into my laptop just to see the image.
Part of the excitement of doing projects like this is figuring out the cheapest and most efficient approach. Since I volunteer at a film school/coworking space, one of the perks is that I have use of their color printer to help move my creative projects forward. I’m so grateful that I can barter my time for both film classes and administrative services.