Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Scarlett v3


Ha! I laugh in the face of paying work. As I have NO paying work I've had a little more time to devote to this project so...here it is. Although Marblehead does sometimes feel isolated and like a colonial village, it was financial restraints, not rustic living, as Hendrix implied, that made me unable to complete this piece with gauche as I would have liked. On the bright side I did get to stretch my digital coloring muscles. Some call it carpal tunnel, I call it devotion.

I'm fairly happy with my Scarlett although in the coloring process I think she started to look less like Scarlett Johannson than she did while in pencil form. I decided that I love Scarlett too much to give her a bad review so I decided to depict her singing happy flowers & butterflies, rather than wilting or rotting ones. I tried to evoke imagery from Tom Waits' "Orphans" album to suggest her taking on Waits' songs but singing them very differently....flowerly to say the least. It may be a bit of a stretch but it was fun! Hope to see some final work from you all shortly...Michael.

7 comments:

Meredith said...

way to actually do the assignment over-achiever.

this probably isn't appropriate to what you're going for, but when I hear the phrase "sickly sweet" it reminds me of lisa frank drawings. i would like to see your drawing look more like that, but again, i don't think that is what you are going for anymore.

M said...

it looks great! way to show us all up. i love the little details in gray in the background.

Ryan Nussbaum said...

Wow! Gorgeous piece! I love the composition, background elements and the way you used color.

MikeC said...

Well done, Ms. Newborn, well done. Even though you're using some pretty loud local colors for the butterflies, the palette you chosen isn't overwhelming and works well. I really like what you've done with the differing line colors, especially in the passage between her hair, face, and clothes. Using the white stroke around the butterflies also gave them a more "surreal" feel that works very well. While his drawing style is very different (very comic-book influenced), Nathan Fox (foxnathan.com) frequently employs different line colors in different parts of his drawing to great effect, and he'd definitely worth taking a look at.

I agree with you, in color it looks a little less like Scarlett than it did before, but I think that's mostly due to her scale in the drawing. If you'd drawn her as a larger percentage of the frame, you would have had more room to finesse the likeness so that it held together through coloring. I wouldn't say the likeness disappeared altogether, though: Scarlett would still be my guess about who this was.

I like the details in the back. Perhaps a few more, some weirder junk, maybe a bit more clutter?

Rachel, I'd call this a success, and it's fantastic to see you actually flexing these creative muscles in your "off" time. You've also singlehandedly made the blog a worthwhile endeavor, and made me look bad by posting first, so thanks for that. You get an A, I'm giving myself a B-, and the rest of you get C+'s until a few more portraits get put up here. Why can't the rest of you be more like Rachel?

m

Scribbles said...

why do you MIKE get a B-. You've slacked more than the rest of us. :P

John Hendrix said...

Hello

I'd like to offer an assignment for the group.
Who can post it for me?

Mike is drunk and in the big easy.
Let me know and I'll send it round the horn.

Alan Sheu (squeaks) said...

hi john!
i can post the assignment for you. email me at alans1@samfox.wustl.edu.