&. Don't Ask

The first was drawn based off various photographs I’d accumulated from just going about my day: wiring on the side of buildings, pipes underneath bridges, and so on. (Not to say this would actually make sense in real life, “coolness” definitely took priority over realism when I was drawing this.)

I actually think the wires weren’t as well done as I would like, since I tend to rely on the texture and transparency of analog materials to draw wires. However, one small detail I really liked doing digitally were spots of light brown color that are supposed to emulate rust, which you can see on bottom third of the piece.

This piece was drawn directly over a photo, of a physical piece I made this week that was starting to look ugly enough that I was considering just using it as a physical reference.

I originally thought of making building-like structures out of cans connected by wires, but I didn’t think I had the tools or materials to pull out off, so I moved onto another idea. I decided on making a console-like object with plenty of flat space I could easily insert wires into (or in this case, strings imitating wires.)

True to the diagram above, I cut and wrapped the metal from a soda can around a wooden block to form a rectangular shape, and put holes into the overlapping edges to sew them together. (A pair of pliers were very useful for this, as well as the flat end of a wrench I used in lieu of a hammer I wasn’t able to find.) I used a screwdriver to put in the holes, and made further use of it to etch in some texture and punch in more spaces for the “wire” to go into.

After weaving in a bunch of elastic string (which was pretty difficult after I’d already sown the object into a closed rectangle) I realized that it wasn’t going to look very appealing without a lot more work, so I decided to shift gears and use it as a base for a digital illustration. There’s not much to say about the original photograph, but here’s some notable changes I made:

- I shifted the perspective of the photo in an attempt to look closer and more level to the viewer (so the illustration and photo don’t entirely match up)

- I made the floor look reflective and gave the edges of the background a foggy texture to better obscure the original background of the photo

- I added stronger highlights to the metal and rounded out the shapes of the string to better emphasize a difference in materials and make it look less like a dull photograph