When doing research for my positive illustration, I came across the works of Marcelo Monreal, who became more prominent after Shawn Mendes’ self-titled album copied his signature style of pulling part of the face, head, or body away to reveal flowers blossoming beneath. The Brazilian artist claims that his Faces [UN]bonded series, which is composed entirely of these types of digital collages, was created for the purpose of showcasing that our exteriors and personalities are a mask; pulling apart pictures of celebrities/models to expose flowers blooming from within is Monreal’s way of revealing the beautiful sides of ourselves that we hide under everything. Like in my positive illustration, I planned to take inspiration from Monreal’s idea of pulling the head apart to expose the mental state underneath. However, I didn’t believe any type of flower would be a good representation of the negative side of mental health...which meant that I needed an additional inspiration for what to put inside.
I ended up searching my personal collection of art-related things for inspiration, mainly because I wasn’t sure what specific “negative” thing to look for on the Internet, and came across my collection of Bizarro treasuries. Bizarro is a one-panel comic strip drawn by Dan Piraro and has been one of many comic strips/treasuries that I have read since childhood; unlike other comics, Bizzarro doesn’t have a set storyline, and each comic intertwines Surrealism and word play with social commentary. When flipping through The Best of Bizarro, Volume II, I found this strip parodying American talk shows in which one of the guests is an octopus-like alien whose race is planning on destroying Earth. Just from that description, it doesn’t sound like something that could be used for a piece on mental health, but seeing the creature ominously looming behind the curtain sparked something in me and, with the treasury in my lap, I sketched what ended up being the basis for my negative illustration. In it, the creature is hiding behind the “mask”, inspired by Monreal, but is slowly emerging with one long tentacle wrapping around the subject’s neck. To me, this held Piraro’s idea that there was something ominous hiding behind the curtain, with that “something” in this case being an unhealthy mental state. Having the tentacle wrap around the neck helps to display that, when struggling, a person may feel as though their disorder controls them and their life. |
This first sketch was completed when I was struggling to find a solid inspiration and was inspired by Alexys Fleming's Alice Angel makeup look (see right). While I initially wanted to connect the torn/melted face to a theme of loneliness or perhaps humanity, I felt that I was grasping at straws for a meaning and was copying Fleming's work almost too much, with the only difference being that mine would be of a person whilst hers is of a video game character.
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Alexys Fleming, better known as Madeyewlook, is a makeup artist and body painter who posts videos on YouTube. Her looks range from practical to intense, and some (like this one) are inspired by video games, movies, and other forms of art.
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This next sketch was inspired by the cover of the second book in the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy, Days of Blood and Starlight. All three covers in the series involve a close-up shot of a female in black and white, with some form of color on her face (a mask, face paint, and thorns/coral of some sort). With this idea in mind, I sketched a close-up image of a person crying, with the idea that the tears could be filled in with the colors of the rainbow while the rest of the face would be black/white to provide emphasis on the meaning behind the rainbow tears...violence against the LGBT community. As a member of the community, I feel strongly against any prejudice/violence others face because of their sexual orientation, so this piece resonated with me theme-wise. However, I thought that the most logical thing to do for the positive piece would be to use another one of the book series' covers as inspiration, but all of them seemed so intense that any positive connotation would seem out of place. I couldn't complete this project without a suitable complement, so I ended up scrapping this idea.
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This is the sketch I plan to use for my negative illustration. Not only does it have two inspirations behind it, with one that could also be used for positive inspiration, but I absolutely loved how this drawing turned out! The broken face is already an eye-catcher, in my opinion, but the odd addition of tentacles and a weird face underneath definitely turned a few heads when I was sketching this in public. The idea behind this is that it relates to mental health - which has its positive and negative sides, a good thing for this project - and how mental disorders may make someone feel like a completely different person. The tentacle around the neck is meant to display how some people feel that their mental state dictates the type of person they should be or life they should live. The only drawback that I could see with using this sketch was that the image/idea behind it is less realistic than many illustrations that I've seen whilst researching, but I felt that depicting the monster made more sense and would contrast better as more of a cartoon. With this, I decided to draw the woman more realistic and have the monster breaking out appear more "fake". |
To try and achieve a good picture that I could use to sketch over or Photoshop before gridding onto the illustration board, I experimented with taking pictures of my face from the front. I ended up standing in front of my bedroom window to acquire some natural lighting, but this ended up not being as simple as I hoped because standing too close to the window ended up bathing my face in slightly white/blue light. I also struggled with what facial expression to pull because both Mendes and the model in Monreal's piece have their mouths slightly opened in a weird expression. |
Of all the pictures I took, I decided to use this one for reference because I thought that the highlighted left side of my face would be a good spot to pull the face away - the whiter side could look more "fake", like a mask, compared to the shaded side of my face. I'm also wearing a T-shirt in this picture, which exposes more of my neck than the sweatshirt I wore in the first few pictures; this will be more helpful when drawing the tentacle around the neck because it allows me to have more space to draw it |
1) I started by sketching a grid of 16 squares x 21 squares on my illustration board. On my printed reference picture, I made a grid with the same dimensions - on that image, each square ended up being 1 in. x 1 in. on my printout. I also sketched out a rough approximation of which part of my face would become the "mask" portion; I decided to use the grid method to sketch that portion of my face in a different area while still keeping the dimensions correct.
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I tried to print my reference picture in black and white because I wanted to contrast the colorful creature with a black-and-white person (not only does this relate back to my inspirations differentiating in color, but it can also represent how, when someone's mental condition takes them over, it can be quite draining), but my printer was low on ink and gave me a reference picture with some orange parts.
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3) I then began to color in my illustration, starting with the creature. I wanted to have somewhat-intricate shading in the tentacles to give the creature less of a flat appearance to then display how serious this feels for the girl; I wasn't sure what colors to use, but having just completed my self-portrait I knew that I would need colors that were quite close to one another. I ended up using the colors Light Blue, Dark Blue, and Violet to shade each tentacle. Trying to give the center of the tentacles a highlight, I outlined them in Dark Blue, filled the center with Light Blue, and then proceeded to darken areas with the Violet and balancing it out with additional Light Blue. I also added some dripping effects that I shaded in with Yellow and Grass Green - not only did I think it looked interesting, but it helped to add some brighter details to the tentacles.
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4) Originally I wasn't going to add suction cups to the tentacles because the octopus-like creature in Piraro's comic didn't have them, but any sketch of mine that omitted suction cups made it look like snakes were coming out of her face. For the outer portions of the suction cups, I lightly shaded them in with Black, then filled in the center with Violet to appear unified with the cool-toned tentacles.
Once the tentacles were completed, I moved on to the next most-visible part of the creature: the bulbous eyeball. I had already freehanded some random mystery substance clinging to the creatures tentacles and thought that transferring that color scheme to the eyeball would emphasize that the liquid comes from the monster. I solidly filled the pupil with the color Black, then outlined the perimeter of the pupil and the iris in Dark Green. Then, with Grass Green, I filled in the rest of the eyeball to try and give it the multi-colored appearance that eyes naturally have. |
6) To stray away from the use of cool colors and give the inside a bit more variety, I began overlapping Carmine and Black in the empty parts of the interior - not only did this give the piece a tad bit of "realism" as to what our insides look like, but the red hue complemented the green in the eye and goop while making the darker blues and purples stand out. |
7) Taking a break from the creature, I began to color in the person with dark/muted colors in order to stay true to Piraro's black/white style while also emphasizing the creature within. I started to achieve this by coloring the eyes with a mixture of Grey and Steel Grey and the hair, eyebrows, and lips with varying intensities of Black. In my reference pictures, there were a few highlights created from standing near the window - I tried to add some of these into the Black with Grey at the scalp and throughout the hair to give it a bit more texture among the varying amounts of Black already present. Some of the Black was accidently smeared on the left cheek, and to avoid it looking sloppy in the piece, I freehanded some tiny cracks/dents over the smear - this went along with the mask aspect, and while I don't think it successfully covered my mistake, it added a tiny detail that emphasized the strain of keeping the creature inside. |
8) To finish the piece, I solidly colored the shirt in the color Orange, adding more pressure around the shirt collar and in areas where the shirt wrinkled. Like in my positive illustration, I wanted to create a solid background, especially because I felt any excessive background detailing would take away from the creature being the piece's main focus; because the untitled Monreal piece I used for inspiration was entirely a peachy color, I decided to color the entire background in Apricot. However, that particular shade turned out to be much lighter than I wanted it to be, so I overlapped it with that same Orange to make it more apparent. While this helped it appear more peachy in the finished photo, it also made it look very similar to the t-shirt...to try and differentiate the background and shirt from one another, I heavily added Marigold around the border of the hair, then lightly layered it over the rest of the background. Marigold was also lightly used to yellow the teeth and get rid of as much white as I could in the piece (it was suggested we cover as much of the board as possible). |
"Untitled Piece from Faces [UN]bonded Project" vs. ". . . I Said I'm Fine"Similarities:
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". . . And here now to tell us why his people intend to destroy all life forms on Planet Earth - the impossible powerful and cruel Creature From Ziltron 7!!" vs. ". . . I Said I'm Fine"Similarities:
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