Hand Painted Zine, Part 12 (Snakes)
Too much thinking has been going into these drawings lately. They tend to start with an idea, then plans and pre-drawings follow, and then a final piece comes out. This is perfectly legitimate and can produce interesting results, but I was feeling a bit dissatisfied.
When I was coming up with ideas for this month's drawing I filled a sketchbook page with little thumbnails in pencil:
And I kind of liked that it had a sort of looseness and spontaneity to it. Sometimes the first sketch has an attractive wonkiness that gets lost after a few revisions. But on the other side of that, there is the fear of jumping into the deep end. Of having to build the drawing as it happens, one piece at the time, living with the consequences of what you've drawn before. This time I told myself, fuck it,
Capturing the beauty of the first sketch
I'm not entire unfamiliar with doing things this way, I really enjoy drawing from life straight with a fountain pen and watercolors. No pencil sketches in between. It feels like good practice and occasionally you end up with these precious snapshots. Cats are of course one of my favorite subjects, they are likely to move at any time so you sort of have to be quick.
We drew a zine together where we did something similar building upon each other's drawings as we went along (for sale here by the way). This is one page from that zine:
Why snakes?
Snakes have been on my mind because we just entered the year of the snake in the Chinese calendar, and I had been drawing a few new year's postcards with the theme. I used to play a lot with colored pencils and these improvised snakes made me think about going back to them. These snakes are on inexpensive chipboard, and the pencil is applied thickly and roughly because I like the paint-like texture. I'm not one of those delicate colored pencils drawers over here 😅
If you are wondering about materials I'm using Prismacolor "premier" which I find soft and nice. There are probably more creamy options out there these work for me so far.
Documenting the progress
I decided to hit the paper straight up without planning too much. I still wanted to capture a little bit of the process so I did it in a sort of regimented way. Spontaneous but strict, oh boy, a living contradiction!
I set up a timer to scan the progress every 5 minutes so I could create this time lapse (18 frames):
When it came time to painting I set up the timer to 10 minutes per scan as watercolors take longer to dry (32 frames at the end). Though I sometimes sped up the drying with a heat gun:
For that last snake I went with color pencils to get that heavy handed texture I like:
Here is the final result, there is a callback to a previous creature and some motifs from the original sketchbook sketch. I like it overall, it's not as premeditated as other pages I have done before but it makes up for it in movement. I also enjoy the process of layering the transparent paints as I go. Like on the "halo" of the top snake on the top-right corner.
