“Owl”
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Although this image was done way back in 2005, it still stands out as one of my best and one of my favorites.
One of my favorite subjects to draw is animals, and birds in particular like this great horned owl. I made the drawing large and detailed in order to do it justice, and it is the most complex inking I have done on a drawing to date. The color fade in the sky was actually done by hand with marker (nowadays I would just as soon use a gradient in Photoshop), and I like the way I cleverly disguised the subtle gradation through the gaps in the trees (markers don’t blend very smoothly).
Overall this was just one of those images in which everything came together nearly perfectly – composition, drawing, inking, and color. It shows off my full potential as an artist, which is at the same time satisfying and frustrating. As much skill and experience as an artist can have, whether or not a work is brilliant or merely good is, for the most part, completely out of their control. You can try your hardest to apply all the lessons you’ve learned but in the end any given piece is a crapshoot, a random convergence of elements and variables that are beyond our powers of understanding as puny mortals.
It’s what makes art exciting – not knowing how something will turn out until it is pieced together and given life. It’s also what makes illustration frustrating when you have deadlines to meet and people to please!
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