“Kill your sweethearts”

In the hopes of really learning this rule I’m gonna make this the topic of the day. To kill your sweethearts is a rule that some writers live by. This means something different for an artist, it means to edit yourself carefully. It means to not let your ego, a detail you feel looks awesome, or an idea or concept any one single aspect of an image that seems too good for adjustments… probably needs to go. This is probably one of the hardest things for me to learn and am admittedly still in the process of learning. It’s the opposite of how I’ve taught myself to work. I used to think if I had one awesome, sweet detail in one of my pieces it was enough to carry the piece as a whole, if I only made it the focal point. This is terrible, it’s a recipe for disaster. As I mentioned before the gestalt is the most important aspect, it doesn’t really care about awesome details if the picture as a whole doesn’t make sense or is stronger than the concept of the image itself. For me to “kill your sweethearts” means to “just let go”. I’ll use the example of the latest project I worked. For the “Pants on Fire” project I had made all these beautiful sketches of a bird with a long swirly tail full of intricate detail. It looked awesome as a sketch. The thing about sketches is that you’re working on black and white (pencil and paper) and once you start working in color you don’t need a lot of those details because they can end up making the piece look busy or maybe they’re no longer necessary because color was used in its place. This is what happened with this project, I had spent so much time putting intricate detail in all the birds feathers that once I brought it over to Illustrator it didn’t make sense. It looked busy, quite frankly it looked like a map. I had to let it go. I loved the detail in the feathers and my ego was begging me to spend hours  just to make that detail work, but guess what I’m under tight deadlines and I had to tell myself to just let it go. I opted for textures to make up for this void of detail in the feathers. It came out quite nice. I’m happy with the result. I made the deadline and my teacher didn’t hate it. Success.

Till next time!
Perla.

Ps (Because of this tight deadline I borrowed this texture from someone on the interwebs and didn’t make it myself.  I can’t find the source to give this person proper credit. I know I found it on a deviant art page and the author was more than happy to share the textures as long as it wasn’t for something commercial. So I think I’m in the clear this time, however I am sad to not give proper credit where it’s due).

 

The Gestalt. [Goodbye Summer 2012 Revisited]

Phew! That was a very long title.

I’ve thought a lot about the “gestalt” of my pieces. Mostly because one of my teachers keeps hammering me on and on about it. (That’s right David Christiana, this is you. In case you are reading this blog from an alternative universe where teachers read their students blogs. I ride to school in a unicorn in said universe). Anyway, so from what I understand so far is that the gestalt is THE most important aspect of any piece. The gestalt is the overall feel of the piece, a sum of everything that is going on in it and what we perceive from its entirety. In other words “the big picture”. This is something very important to master it needs fine tuning like a musical instrument. Too much of something can throw us all off, too little can also have a regrettable outcome. This is something that I specifically struggle with because most of the time I just want to make something visually pleasing, art for the sake of art. And believe it or not it is very hard to make beautiful things that are just that: beautiful. “L’art pour l’art” as the french call it, hangs from the very thread of its existence. Making beautiful things just for the sake of beauty is challenging, you have to really  consider many other things than just making pretty things here and there. The whole composition needs to make sense. There is a need for balance, a sense of depth and a sense of purpose. It needs to visually communicate what the author is trying to convey. Keeping all these things in mind I revisited the poster illustration I recently posted. I wasn’t happy with it. I could not figure out why. Nevertheless, I tried to satisfy this idea of “gestalt” and this is what I came up with:

It’s all about prioritizing when it comes to this “gestalt”. Hope I inspired some of you out there, or maybe you learned something you didn’t know before? Maybe?
Hopefully, that would be fantastic. You owe me $100 bucks.
Just kidding.

Happy Weekend!
-Perla.