Tiny Wonderland :: PandaErica :: Process

Hello Panda People,

It's been a year and a day, but I am back and I have great news to share with you. I'll be showing a triptych of three tiny paintings at Leanna Lin's Wonderland's new show, 'Tiny Wonderland: Great Things in Small Packages'. It will be opening this Saturday, September 9th and will run until October 23rd.


In anticipation of the show's opening night, that I sadly will not be able to attend, I felt it could be fun to show everyone my thought process that went into creating my final 3 paintings for the show. When I first got the acceptance email that I was going to be in the show and received the details and specs for the paintings (no artist was allowed to submit more than 3 paintings maximum and each painting could be no larger than 5x5 inches framed) I thought that these 3 paintings would take me no more than maybe 2 weeks tops. In the end it took me about a little more than a month to finish these three tiny paintings from conception to final, framed painting.

Let me first begin by showing you the very initial page of sketchbook I dedicated to the Tiny Wonderland project (right). I wrote the name of the show down and wrote all the words that just flowed from my head that I associated with the show name. I immediately stuck to the word "house". And from there I knew I wanted to created tiny houses of some sort. "What would live in these tiny houses?" I asked myself. Tiny animals. DUH.

Now, this doesn't happen very often when I'm planning out a very intense project. I hardly ever find that my first sketch ideas are the best nor are they the sketches that I end up turning into the final pieces. But in this instance, that's exactly what ended up happening. I started with these super, teeny, tiny thumbnails sketches of a bunny burrow, some of the first few words I jotted down. And from there I developed what would then become the basis of the 3 triptych paintings: a bedroom/living room, a kitchen/dining room, and a surprise super fun dance hall at the end.

I began sketching during my commutes to and from work and also during my lunch breaks at my day job. I also started researching different interior design across the decades. I created something of a mood board with a mix of 40's and 70's interior design. The top row (above) of sketches were done just off the top of my head after some light perusing through google search for different interior designs through the decades. The bottom row (above) were informed sketches with photo references clear in my mind. I ended up going with the bottom 40's inspired bedroom and kitchen scenes since they felt more dynamic and gave a deeper sense of depth than the other sketches. This idea of large rooms in tiny paintings and a depth perception one would experience when looking at the paintings really intrigued me. Little paintings, big rooms. 

     

I also started pulling lots of images of the animals I wanted to include include in the finale disco party scene. I went to the American History Museum to take some pictures of some of their awesome animal scenes. I tried to draw inspiration from many different sources.

    

And let's not forget the fun, patterned, crazy-colored, sequined and shiny disco attire! Fashion was kind of wacky but so much fun back in the disco era. :)

  

Based on some friends and co-workers suggestions I decided it would be more engaging for the audience/art viewers to add animal characters into all three of the paintings, not just in the finale dance party scene. After I gave it some thought, I decided to add some animals getting ready for the party in the bedroom and some party guests toasting some bubbly drinks in the kitchen. 

Next was color and for about a week I took my tray or Caran d'ache crayons with me and my portable water brush to work on these rough color studies (above) that developed into the final color studies (below).

 

I ended up changing the ferret getting dressed in the first painting to be a mouse since I thought the silhouette of that animal would be instantly recognizable with its big ears, long nose, and skinny pink tail. I had to think of what would be easiest to understand at such a small size and the ferret just wasn't doing that. 

 

 
I also ended up going back into the color study for the second painting. The first initial study (left) first had yellow walls (right), but once I added the characters and their bright costumes into the scene I felt that all of the bright saturated colors was just too much. I went back into the first study and painted the left wall blue and went with the overall more toned down earthy tones.

I didn't have much trouble seeing the colors in the final scene. I knew I wanted it to be the most saturated and brightest colors of the three. It would also be the painting that was set with darker values overall with mid-key and low-key lights which I don't usually do much in my paintings, so I was pretty excited to get started on the last painting. But I decided to paint the disco scene last in order to keep that excited energy running throughout all three paintings.

   

And here is the result of all of this process work—the final paintings! I'm very pleased with the way they turned out and I hope everyone who goes to see the show can feel how much fun I had painting them. Feel free to send me an email if you would like to purchase the actual paintings or just one of the three. They're framed in 5x5 inch black frames (below) and they come with their own mounting hooks.



I hope you enjoyed reading about the making of these three tiny paintings exploring a tiny wonderland underground. :) If you're in the Eagle Rock, CA area while the show is running please swing by and take some pictures of the paintings for me!

Until next time, folks. Thanks again for reading this very long post.

Love,
Erica

My Cousin's Save the Date card

Hi Panda People!

Back in April, I got to design my cousin, Alexandria and her fiancee's Save the Date cards. They met online, I believe via Facebook. They wanted their cards to reflect how they met and be reminiscent of how at the beginning of their relationship was mostly online because of their long distance apart, she lived in Kissimmee and he in Miami or close to there at least. 

So these are the final design for their October wedding save the date cards. They were double sided and on heavier stock with a gloss lamination on them to enhance the colors. The front of the card is a mock facebook message chat box with their main dates and location information. I though it'd be fun to have instead of the text in the message boxes, it could simply be images that would relay the main message of an engagement between 2 beautiful people. The back of the card had a fun narrative illustration of how her fiancee popped the question on her, albeit I'm not 100% clear that is how he actually did it, but Alex has tells me my illustration is a perfect romanticized version of how it went down, which is pretty fitting when you think that their whole relationship started online as well. 

"She Said Yes!" - Save the Date - BACK (Final)

Facebook Message - Save the Date - FRONT (Final)

Here's a little bit of the process of how the art for the card was made:

  

 

I started off by making a list of words that include emotions, feelings, and words that encapsulate what I'm trying to achieve with a project (ie. hitched, facebook, cute, romantic, modern, online dating, etc.). Sometimes I do this step before I draw or after I draw, but I always try to look for some inspirational art or photos that fuel my ideas and help emphasize the words I've written down. Then I come up with a few or sometimes a lot of tiny sketches called 'thumbnails' that just get the gist of the concept of the art. I came up with the above 4, and few other miscellaneous sketches that weren't as strong as these 4 that I decided not to show you guys. 

Front of card's refined line sketch

Back of card's refined line sketch

After I talked to Alex and Patrick and we figured out which concept(s) they liked the best, I gather up the final text that needed to be included on the cards and sketched up refined line drawings of the winning concepts. I usually just block in the shapes of the general space the text will take up on the page, like how you see it in the sketch of the front of the card. I don't think of what the text will look like font-wise, I just think of it as purely designing shape and composition alongside my drawings and try to figure out the text details later.

 

Here are a few examples of the hand drawn text I did for the card. At first I wanted to hand draw their names for the front of the card, but soon realized it just didn't look very organized and I couldn't get the shape of their letterforms to fall into a nice shape. It was too organic for the more modern, sans serif feel I got from looking at a facebook chat box. As for the back illustration's hand drawn text, I knew I wanted a swirly font that had a lot of swashes (the curly cues of the letter that connect them to th letter in front of and behind them, ie. the curly loop that connects the 'e' and 's' in 'Yes!'). So I went to different font websites like dafont.com or myfonts.com and found some great fonts that I liked. I took pictures of the words I needed in these inspirational fonts and then tried to base my hand drawn type off them, while adding my own flair (ie. the heart dot for the 'i' in 'said').

 

 

After I figured out the finer details, I moved on to color studies. I do as many studies as I feel I need to have enough variety to show Alex and Patrick. For the front of the card it was more like 6 studies, but I'm only showing these 4 because they were the most finished. I started and did not finish a lot of color studies because I could tell from the get go they weren't going to work. Sometimes I just have to see things that blatantly don't work in order to get to the colors that do work well together. I try not to limit myself and try everything, but choose to only show you these 4 I showed Alex and Patrick.

For the back of the card I really only did one color study (above). I do my color studies in the art materials that I anticipate using for the final illustrations. In this case, I used watercolors, caran d'ache water soluble crayons, and colored pencils.

I did do a few studies to see what kind of background I wanted the back of the card to be on. I used photoshop to change Patrick's shirt color and the dialogue bubble with the rings and the screen of the laptop. I also made the shadows, Alex's hair, shorts, Patrick's hair and pants much darker to bump up the contrast I wanted to achieve for the final color illustration.

    

Lastly, I paint the final illustration elements at about 2x the size of how they will appear on the actual card. That way I can guarantee that when they are reduced in size the art will still be crisp and sharp around the edges. I paint each element separately so that I can layer them on top of each other in photoshop as I know that I will have to color correct each image after I scan them. When I scan my paintings the original colors are always portrayed accurately by the scanner and on the screen of my computer so it takes some finangling in photoshop to get the colors look more true to how I painted them and I usually enhance colors where I can to brighten up darks spots and clean up stray mistakes I've made in the original paintings. Above you can see the raw scans of a few elements for the card. The sunburst background got much lighter in the final design. I touched up the vignette of Alex and Patrick a lot because the scan came out much bluer than I wanted it to be and the watercolor paper I painted it on ended up buckling a little when it dried as you can see behind their heads (there's an annoying shadow where the paper didn't lay flat as I scanned it). 

All in all, it takes a lot of preparation to finish a final illustration and even after I paint the final illustration, there still is a lot of work to prepare the files for the printer who will print the cards on the paper stock. I have to take into consideration the type of paper stock, how heavy the paper is, how much ink may absorb into the paper rather than lay on top of the paper and what kind of lamination the card will have. All of those aspects and more go into my decisions to how the print file is set up. And it's much tougher when I'm not the one talking to the printer myself and feeling and looking at the actual paper in person. But I did my best. 

And here's the printed card I got in the mail shortly after I gave my cousin the print files:

I'm pretty happy with how they printed out and my cousin and her boo are too. I can count that as a job well done. 

Thanks for reading this very long process post, everyone. Happy Sunday to you all!

Love, Erica