So, i’ve been thinking about trying my hand at Illustration Friday for a while now. Last week, i finally decided it was time to get around to doing it.
Part of the reason for my decision is that i feel like my art’s been stagnating a bit lately. I mean, yes i draw every single day and yes i’m a full-time art student but it’s been a long, long time since i spent more than twenty minutes on something i wasn’t getting graded on. And if i love to draw and create so much, why don’t i ever finish a bloody project on my own?
Illustration Friday, i figure, is a pretty good compromise. I’m not entirely self-motivated but i don’t have to do it either – which, oddly enough, makes me more likely to get around to doing it.
One thing i’ve already discovered is that i vastly underestimate the amount of time an image will take. I can probably blame my daily sketches for this – because i practice every single day, i’m now pretty good at whipping out a nice pen-and-ink in only about twenty minutes. The portraits i’ve been posting lately are of a quality that used to take me about four hours, and it seems that somehow in my head, the amount of time it takes me to work in other medium has also shrunk, when in practice, it really hasn’t.
Which is why this picture here, even though i’ve been working on it all bloody week, is only about half-finished.
Also why the picture from last week didn’t get around to being posted at all.
Well, ’nuff about IF, about the picture itself.
Obviously, the word of the week was red. I’ll readily admit to being a bit of a communist (though i’ll just as readily admit that communist governments have the rather glaring fault of being too easily corrupted) and i positively adore Russia, so i decided to go with a USSR theme for this. In the full pen sketch, the woman is holding a hammer in one hand and a sickle in the other. I was considering adding some text from an old Soviet political poster, too – something like «Родина-мать Зовет!» – but haven’t gotten around to it yet.