Contest Entry for ART EXPLOSION WEEK 24: Theme LIGHT by @juliakponsford

Hello Dear Friends,

I like weekly contest themes by @juliakponsford and @vachemorte so much, that I just can't resist participating! This week's edition theme is LIGHT, and that's exactly what we love and cultivate in Shiny Forest hah. Thank you guys for organising this great contest!

So, a vision came to my mind, of a cat staring into darkness, with eyes emitting light like they were torches. I think I had this idea because I saw recently this hilarious photo of a dog at night (and also made it my temporary Fb profile pic in an instant). The dog's eyes were lit up by camera, and together with a sweet and careless expression of the dog it looked very funny and cool to me. I really enjoy this effect and I wanted to include it in my art for quite a long time. I was thinking for example about a scene where a troop of torch-eyed dogs chases after an intruder in a dark, haunting forest. This fantasy may still become a reality one day ;) Speaking of inspirations, also the Catbus from My Neighbour Totoro comes to my mind. Nonetheless I know that this time my inspiration was mainly based on the pics and films of a nocturnal wildlife, and also on the shiny stares of my own animals at night.

Where there's light, there's also shadow, and I wanted to expose some of their inevitable relationship in this piece.

Pen and ink on paper, 21 x 29,7 cm

Traditionally, I created my work with pencil, pens and markers, and processed it in GIMP (resizing and GIF creation). The paper is a stock paper for printer (if you happen to now a good quality, smooth, low-absorbent paper, you are more than welcome to hint me).

I love using printer paper but recently I'm getting more and more frustrated with how badly it behaves at the final stages of work. For example it sort of deforms and/or absorbs ink in an uneven way, which eventually leads to quite serious distortions of my drawing. I stick to it because of its qualities, but I'll definitely be moving on to a different, more predictable medium. I'm also thinking about using other techniques, but shh, let's not spoil the surprise ;)

I'm in a quite reflective (and chatty) mood tonight. The truth is, I haven't been drawing on a regular basis for a very long period of time before I joined Steemit. I sort of picked up where I left, meaning high school, so not only I'm quite rusty, I also have a lot to learn. There are things I need to remind myself, and things I never properly grasped, which still need to be learnt. It's relatively easy to feel overwhelmed, and frustrated, too. I feel some kind of loss because of that, but at the same time I'm very thankful for any progress that I experience. Being aware of the shortcomings of my amateur artwork as I am, I try not to give up ;) You can keep your fingers crossed for me, if you enjoy my drawings ;)

PROGRESS STEP BY STEP

My contest entries (especially for ART EXPLOSIONS) tend to be more conceptual and less detailed, I'd say, than classic Shiny Forest postcards. Here we have a pencil sketch of only a cat, the light coming out of cat's eyes and the darkness spilt all around (caution: depending on your monitor settings the work can be hard to see, it's a delicate pencil sketch).

After I used pen I thought that cat's shadow would supplement this piece nicely. And I went for it! The cat's cute but serious.

I went rough with the base of the shadows. I wanted to be the shapes of the darkness and cat's shadow to correspond nicely with each other. I wanted them to be diagonally oriented and a little wavy.

I started with stippling right away, because the thick lines left by marker were a total eyesore. I decided that cat's shadow's texture will be thicker, and the background will be fine and grainy, to get a pleasant contrast.

I worked on a texture by adding countless dots, organized in lines. This process was gradual and global, I wanted to observe the whole piece's change at once, rather than work separately on different parts.

After I was starting to feel good about the background I got rid of pencil marks, and began to work on the cat. I added some lines on the beams of light.

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Cat was shaded very delicately, I wanted it to sort of glow on its own.

At this stage I decided to finish. Sometimes I get the impression that I should underdo my art rather than overdo it, because I have some bad experiences not stopping when I should hah ;)

Here's a little GIF for you:

I hope you enjoyed my art. I had a lot of fun creating it and hopefully you'll like it ;) Here's my last week entry for @juliakponsford and @vachemorte contest, if you're interested, where the theme was conspiracy. IT was related to the Steemit exclusive WORLD PREMIERE of THE JUJU GUM CONSPIRACY. It's a very cool, hilarious and dark series by our fellow Steemians juliakponsford and @vachemorte, you can watch first episode here and the latest one here :) Totally worth it!

Love,

Klaudia