For context, this was the first drawing I made after I got laid off from the job I held for 5 years. I had kind of been on autopilot for a while and I had begun a bit of a new phase. I took stock of my life; time to reflect on who I am, where I am, what I want for my future and how to achieve that.
Despite following the right path, going to college, working a 9-5, making more money than all my friends, yet still being unable to afford to rent even a bachelor apartment, I felt I needed a bit of a course correction.
I was also madly obsessed with Dune after the Denis Villeneuve movies came out and two of the pivotal concepts in that story are prescience and destiny; being able to see the future, yet being unable to affect it, whether you want to or not.
I see similarities between Paul’s relationship with his future on Arrakis and my relationship with my art. It’s always been something I’ve turned away from because of the whole “starving artist” thing and being pushed toward getting a “real job”. But what if things changed, and there was little difference between the two paths? I got a real job but instead of being a starving artist, I was, in a sense, still just a starving salaryman.
I know I have this incredible and rare talent and I know there are people half as talented as I am, making 10x more money than me through their craft. I already knew how to make videos which, in the social media era, is an extraordinarily valuable skill and I know I have something interesting to record so I would have to be a fool not to at least attempt to exploit it, right?
I wanted to start taking my art seriously and making a name for myself through social media — especially when the traditional path of working a real job doesn’t offer nearly as much stability and security as it used to.
All of this rambling is to say that I was feeling optimistic for the first time in a while. After losing my job, I felt I had the opportunity to open my mind a bit to the potential of a path different to the one to which I thought I was fixed.
I felt enlightened.
I had an idea of what I wanted this drawing to be — a close up on a person’s eyes, looking up. One of my go-to photographers, who work I went to for a lot of my older drawings, is a man I only know as Adrian272727, who I discovered on Deviantart in my early years. And in his gallery, I found my base image. A photo featuring my favourite model he works with, a woman I only know as Carole. Here’s the link. I went on to add my “enlightened” touch with Procreate and got to work.
… which was Only a Dream. This was the essence of my recent “autopilot” phase; Just working from home, eating, sleeping, going out on the weekends and that’s about it lol. So with this being my first major project in a long time, I kinda made a couple stupid mistakes. Not really in the drawing itself, but in the prep work. Idiot that I am, I fixed the paper to my artboard using duct tape and I also forgot to do that thing with the painters tape where you stick it on your shirt a few times to make it less sticky.
So when I finished my beautiful artwork and went to remove the tape, the paper got a little damaged. I was able to “heal” the tears a little with graphite powder and gesso but if you look even moderately closely, it’s easy to see.
Not my best performance teehee.
I had already started this one with the goal of starting a youtube channel so now, thinking like an influencer (just saying that makes me wanna puke) I saw the mistakes I made as a point of interest and used it to frame the video. Of course, with this being my first video, I got like 30 views which wasn’t surprising but I was still happy with the outcome and the fact that I had finally started gaining a little experience with posting art on social media.