Postcards: Plant, Animal, Object -- the origin story

Hello, friends!

As you might have noticed, I go through waves of being a impulsive Kickstarter.  I want to Kickstart and Patreon all the things!  If it weren't for this pesky being poor thing, I feel I was destined to be a patron of the arts.  I could have a fleet of artists working for me.  It would be glorious.

But back on track!  I Kickstarted a book of postcards by Shing Yin Khor, and it recently arrived.  It is amazing!  Carley and I were both ooohin and awwwing over it.  Huge fans of the art.  The art also feels very approachable.  It is deceptively... something.  It looks simpler than it is.  And so, what a good jumping off place for me to start improving!

I started trying to really look at it.  Pick out things I could try to incorporate into my postcards.  One of the things I latched onto was the variety of objects in each composition.  It is 0% how my brain works;  I knew I needed outside help.  

I started asking my friends, beginning with Ross, for an animal, an object, and a plant.  Ross tends to take my request and then make them as difficult as possible, so I pushed for not that.

You can see him still leaning towards being ridiculous.  A prehistoric fern?  How is that different from a contemporary fern?  How do I source that image?  How will the audience know?  Still, it was a good place to get started, and that's what I needed the most.  No constraints is not good.

The next step was dig up some inspiring images.

I am really bad about considering the background first, but looking at Shing's work, it was clear I needed to get some color down before I started penciling things in.

Ok, next up, some fine pipes in opposite corners, forcing myself to not orient all my elements the same way.

The field mouse, which becomes the visual anchor, and, despite my earlier efforts, discourages rotating the image.

I went with the fossilized fern, and then threw in the beetle.  I feel like both of them can be rotated any direction and still look appropriate.

Boom!  My first postcard in this style.  Hopefully it looks less like my usual scribbles and more harmonious.  If you compare it to Shing's work, I am still probably only at 50% the complexity their art.  I probably won't make it to a comparable level, but I feel like I am growing in the right direction.