Whisper Gallery I

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Earlier this year I was invited by @mrblinddraw to participate in a collaborative art project called Whisper Gallery. The name comes from a well-known game called "Chinese Whispers" (known as "Telephone" in the United States). @mrblinddraw explains the game as follows:

This is a common children's game where theres a line or circle formed of people. One person has a piece of verbal information (usually one phrase) that they take and whisper it into the person's ear next to them. The circle of people go around whispering the phrases they hear around in a circle until the very end. Then the original and the end results are compared. Usually errors occur and the original phrase gets altered to a state that's comical.

His idea was to convert this game into something more artistic. Instead of passing along a verbal phrase, a group of artists would pass original works of art from one person to the next. Here's the description of Whisper Gallery found in @mrblinddraw's original Steemit post about the project:

To create a chain of artistic creations that are initiated by a seed idea/art piece (one piece of artwork inspires the next piece, and so on).
[Imagine the interpretations based on interpretations not limited to any artistic genre (painting, animation, architecture, film, music, photography, dance). A painted portrait could be interpreted into a building by an architect, then into a shoe by a shoe designer, etc. The interpretations can transcend art and connect people.]

My Shadow City

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My Shadow City
Whisper Gallery I - Week VII
by @juliakponsford

As the contributor to Week VIII, my creation is in response to the Week VII contributor, artist and musician @juliakponsford. She passed along a beautiful digital drawing (shown above) of a panther chimera standing in front of a chaotic city. The aspect of her work that most interested me is her idea of the shadow world. In her post about her creation, she explains the concept as follows:

I wanted to make a more sinister shadow version of the panther to represent the shadow self, and in the background I reflected that with the upright city and the shadow city that is much more vaporous and indistinct.

That idea of the shadow city is what I chose to run with in my own creation.

Inverted City

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Below is my contribution to Whisper Gallery I:

Inverted City
Whisper Gallery I - Week VIII
Digital drawing by @erb

Process

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If a typical city is built on the surface of a sphere (planet Earth), I interpreted the idea of a shadow city to be an inverted city built on the inside surface of a sphere. This concept is not so different from The Upside-Down in the show Stranger Things, except in the Shadow City everything is inverted.

I started my creative process by building the city in the 3d modeling software Rhino. I created a spherical surface and began extruding skyscraper-like structures towards the centerpoint of the sphere. I then split the structures into smaller squares and started cutting out certain squares to create variation. Once I was happy with the overall feel of the city, I created a rendering using the software built into Rhino.

With this final rendering, my final step was to take it into Photoshop and give it color and texture. I have a folder of beautiful paper textures that I've collected over the years, mostly from an amazing Japanese paper store here in Los Angeles. I specifically chose paper textures that gave one the feeling of being underground. The buildings are ghosted and faint, as if they're merely voids carved into the solid body of the planet.

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Many thanks to @mrblinddraw for inviting me to participate in this collaborative process. Also, big thanks to @juliakponsford and the other talented artists that came before her: @upheaver, @paolobeneforti, @aksinya, @voronenka, @natureofbeing, @artistchristian.

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Thanks for reading!
Let me know what you think of this original drawing in the comments below.
All feedback is welcome!

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