Sachi Swick

Digital Painting Design Narrative

I was looking at the work of Alfons Mucha and decided that I wanted to attempt to draw

something in a similar style. I was kind of in a swooshy, swirly mood anyway, so art

nouveau kind of worked out at the time. However, while I was looking through Mucha

posters, I decided that they consisted of far too many pretty women, and thus I was

determined to make the subject matter something really gross and ugly. I considered

using a Persian cat face, road kill and even slaughtered meat, but eventually I settled on

the potato bug. There was a specific Mucha work that depicted a bunch of peonies with

swirling stems and leaves. I liked it because the stems were very thought out and almost

geometric, so if I were to do something similar, I could experiment with flower stems to

make my work look more graphic.

After drawing a bunch of thumbnail sketches, I decided to draw elements that I knew for

sure would be in my piece. I could later move around those elements in Photoshop to

experiment with composition. Drawing the potato bug was difficult because I don’t know

the anatomy of a potato bug, and I didn’t have the right angle of what I wanted in my

reference photos. I had to improvise with a lot of it. I’m kind of obsessive, so that was a

little distressing for me. But it seemed to work out – as long as an entomologist doesn’t

look at it, I’m good. After that I was drawn out, so I traced the flowers and just made sure

to give the outermost edge a thicker outline, because that was a common detail in

Mucha’s works. While placing the images in Photoshop, I decided that I liked the look of

the bug exceeding the box borders. I wanted to make the stems look like they were

almost continuous from box to box, and that they flowed together. I also tried to make

sure my flowers were relatively balanced on both sides of the bug.

After I had everything drawn out the way I wanted it to be, I cleaned up the line drawing

in Photoshop, printed it out, cleaned it up again with a black colored pencil and added

shading with a blue colored pencil. The picture was scanned back onto my computer, and

then I added the color. I originally had a red and green color pallet, but then messed with

the hue at the end, and found a different color pallet I liked. I also added texture in the

background with some splatter paintbrushes I had downloaded a while ago.

Overall I’m pleased with the end result. This assignment helped me to explore color in a

way I’m not used to. I tend to fill my artwork with really bright, almost garish colors, and

I kind of like the more subtle effect I have with this piece. The thumbnails and constant

sketching was also new to me, and all the planning definitely helped me to produce a

more thoughtful composition. I think I still need to fool around with more texture in the

painting, I feel like there isn’t quite enough unity between the hand drawn qualities, and

computer produced qualities.