I had high hopes and was fully of dreams about attending RISD; perusing illustration and becoming another artist with a BFA by 2018/2019.
remember working on this image, curled up with my cats and an elevated knee (lift gate at work broke.)
I had high hopes and was fully of dreams about attending RISD; perusing illustration and becoming another artist with a BFA by 2018/2019.
I did not get into RISD. I kept working away at my community college. I now stack my two associate degrees in a trench coat. My baby sibling got into a good 4 year school. So, I tossed my coins hard into furry art and conventions to help raise their tuition. My mother was hip deep in a nasty, prolonged divorce related issues due to my sperm doner choosing to (financially) starve us vs pay his part of our tuitions and higher education costs. (She never did get paid back.)
I am now in my mid 30s, revisiting this piece which I only have iPhone 4S photos of because we had to mail in the originals as part of the application. I remember being laid up because the lift gate at work failed under me, a coworker, and a flat of dishes. I was given a week to be off my very swollen and colorful knee, so curled up to work on this application piece.
The original was done with a loving cat curled up under the drawing board, many pens, and poor posture.
The rework was done on an iPad, curled up with slightly better poster (took breaks to stretch) and the ability to erase and redo some bits. I did rework elements of this piece a little bit. Tweaked the aspect ratio, added some filler bits… swapped some parts around. But it lives again. One of the largest Dreaming style pieces I have ever done. (All in pen at the time.) I think it is still the largest piece (file was so big I only got 10 layers to work with).
I spent time reflecting about the life cycles most animals go through. Birth, growth, life, death, reentry to the soil. Only one thing is promised once you are born, that someday you will die. The rest is up to instinct, chance, and (for some animals <hard eyes humans as a whole>) choice.
The Dreaming series has always been meditative for me. I can see where I can just let my mind loosen a little bit. Almost like on autopilot, I can know how I want the piece to work and twist, and nudge it the right ways to do so.
I also reflected on the Dreaming series as a whole body of work. I have done several animals, both common and unique. I rarely revisit an animal once I have rendered it. I did a Wolf; have not done a second. I rendered one frog; never came back for another variant. Did a kangaroo, haven’t done another. Horses are an exception; I think I have rendered them 3 or 4 times. Dragons are another, people like them.
Cycles has two requested animals: Fox and Owl. Each deserve a solo image. They will get one. But for now they live again, along with many, many rabbits.
This work was posted to Patreon / Ko-fi first before the wider internet. If you would like to help support the creation of works like this one, please take a look there.
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