Experimentin'

Recently I've been playing around a lot in Photoshop, experimenting and trying out different coloring techniques that I've always meant to try but for one reason or another never got around to doing. If you've been following my work you know that I primarily work with inks, acrylics, and gouache. I did a few digital illustrations while I was at Otis, but I stuck with traditional media because it was more comfortable to me, and because I didn't think my digital illustrations had the same character and "life" that my paintings did. Also, I love having something tactile, a real-life piece you can hold in your hands.

Aaanyyywayyyy, I finally have the tools, time, and focus to experiment a bit more with digital illustrations, so I did this portrait of Sufjan Stevens:



I took the aesthetic from Sufjan's latest video and his recent live show get-ups. What do you think?

I also scanned a bunch of scrap paper on which I tested out colors for various paintings (there are probably at least a dozen different paintings represented here) and made this kaleidoscopic image:



Then I messed around with colors, filters, and adjustment layers to make it look pixelated. Originally, this was gonna be a more prominent part of the Sufjan illustration, but there was a lot going on already, so I confined the pixels to Sufjan's lenses:



Experimentation! Yay!