After Dark

Ah, finally I have time to be able to update a little more from my final year at SCAD. I've been almost constantly chipping away at several projects at once, but the first recently completed piece is a book cover for our Type and Image class. Embarrassingly, I hardly ever read, so my library of books that I had to chose from was limited to say the least. One book that I remember fondly though was After Dark by Murakami. Without going into any details because it is in fact quite late, the book to me was more or less about the night life of Japan that essentially became an organic being; there was something almost sentient about it that seemed to encapsulate everyone underneath. Here were four early sketches from the beginning stages: 

The first and the fourth ideas were the strongest, though since I felt that the first idea had been done over and over again, I decided on the last. This painting, in more ways than any other piece before this, really cemented in my head the digital process. Except for the sketch and a few textures, the piece was done completely in Photoshop and Painter in the same vein as my DLH album cover. Also, with this I feel like I have the strongest grasp on painting when it is done digitally, as if my ties to traditional media have been permanently cut (which is something that I am learning the hard way, as shown on a painting that I am currently working on). As I'm sure everyone saw coming, this painting is very dark and as a result the print-out version looked terrible. But, that was expected. I'll post the digital version so you can get a better grasp of what I was going for. I wanted to capture the feel of city-night in a more conceptual way, and there was a small debate about which way the "legs" should be facing.

Here is the final piece. Mind the lorem: