hey guys, i'm actually super nervous about this one. and yes, a big part of that is because
it features a person, but it also comes from such a personal place. why does drawing people make me
so nervous? a lot of it is just because i am so heavily reference based artist,
and i don't want to draw a person that looks like a real person by accident, and i don't want to
draw pictures of myself. i just don't do it that much. but this is technically a redraw inspired by
the collab lab at rafi and klee's patreon page, and i'm going to list the required guidelines
for this piece of art: one, it has to have an inside/outside juxtaposition, whether literal or
metaphorical. it has to incorporate a tree representing one side of this duality, literal or
abstract. it has to have a landscape representing the other side of duality, literal or abstract.
i find the collab lab always get me to dig deep, i think because i put it off for a while,
because it has such a long deadline, and when you let your brain kind of work through things
for a while, sometimes things just click into place. although this one, incorporating a tree
really just hearkened back to a painting i did several years ago. this one, called "hollow yet
productive". it's a weird painting, and this is my old style where i didn't really do backgrounds,
i just did watercolor splashes. and she has this gigantic head, perspective is kind of weird. it
was very simple. i don't know if there's a video already about this, but i'm going to go into
more detail because i can. this was originally inspired by my grandparents peach orchard. now,
this isnt really necessary to understand, but when i was a tiny child, that peach orchard
was a really nice place to me. so many of the peaches would ripen on the tree, which meant that
i spent a lot of summers just sitting under the trees while my grandpa would pull down a bunch of
tree-ripened peaches for me to eat. i have never had a peach like that since. they're so good,
they're so good. when my family had a falling out, i wasn't able to go there ever again
really, and peaches, you can't just ship them or travel with them really,
so that was pretty much it for fresh peaches. at one point, i was able to go back. my mom
pulled me out of school, to ditch school and work, and drive up there because there was weird stuff
going on, and it was a confrontation! i don't know how many details to include in this story
because none of them are important. heck, i'll just record it and decide later. story time!
when my family had a falling out, it was kind of a big deal, and i genuinely don't think that
i really progressed emotionally or mentally beyond that moment... and things didn't really get better
after that. home life just kind of sucked for me. but what i didn't know is that apparently,
my grandmother had some kind of plan this whole time, where on my 18th birthday, she bribed a
cousin who i wasn't really that close with, to invite me to her house for an overnight stay. i
thought that was really really weird, because we hadn't really seen each other in a decade?
and so my aunt and uncle came over randomly and said, "yeah, there's an issue: grandma has paid
our kid to invite your kid over so that they can come get her." so i guess that was
some weird plan where my grandparents were waiting for me to be of legal age so that they could...
i don't know. my mom decided to skip work and school and go up to grandparent's house, they
lived six hours away, to sit and chat for an hour to tell them that i'm not in any actual danger,
i do not need saving, and that they should not try to come and pick me up and take me away... as
an 18 year old person. it was a really lovely day for nostalgic reasons, although i didn't really...
i was really annoyed though, that nobody asked me before taking me out there to tell them that i was
okay... they never asked me if i was okay, which seems like a really large oversight in the plan.
but i tried my best. i don't think i was that reassuring. but that was when i saw the trees.
these trees that were such an important part of my tiny childhood, they were all but dead. the trunks
were completely hollowed out from age i guess, and i was just in complete awe that these trees
could go through so much and produce so much for others to the point where there were nothing but
bark left. in order to get another year of fruit, one last year of fruit, he'd filled
the trees with planks of wood and tied it up with rope. it's just visually striking, and also
shocking, in the sense that i didn't think that such a thing could work. and the trees
had peaches growing on them! and it was just relatable, you know? it was super relatable
to think this really is just so much what life is like. whether you've known it all along or whether
people have been learning it in 2020, but just how the world doesn't care who you are, how you feel,
whether or not you're well. there are just so many times where you go to work literally sick,
or if you are having a really bad mental health day, every day, for months, for years, but you
still go to work and you still do what your boss tells you. And you just don't talk to anybody and
keep your head down, but you just do it because they expect you to, and if you don't put yourself
aside, they'll just replace you. that's what i was trying to capture for myself in this
particular set of paintings, is just this this feeling of just giving everything that you can
when you don't have anything to give. and so this painting is the perspective of the tree. so yeah,
as far as paintings go, this is quite the glow up i think. and it's pretty cool to see that even if
i don't think i've really improved that much, i kind of have, haven't i? i was pretty much using
green gold and this really nice coral red type of color. i don't know the names of these colors,
and payne's gray, because it's the darkest color i have and it kind of goes with everything.
i snuck in the little landscape detail of the collaboration onto the peaches. ah, made sense
to me. she's producing for the landscape. i have chickadees because to me, chickadees
are a motif that i use to represent hard work. i use real strings for the ropes, because it makes
such amazing texture. i also randomly added a key to this. the key is just to go anywhere
she wants and do whatever she wants, but she doesn't know what to do with it. there's no
lock or anywhere to put a key in this picture. you know, like the only person who has the power to
do anything about it is yourself, but what do you do with it? what do you do with this empowerment
that you may or may not give yourself, you know? i was worried about showing this one just because it
looks kind of morbid. it looks kind of spooky, kind of gross. it's really just meant to be
dry wood bark, right, but it looks kind of gory in this context,
and i hope it doesn't gross anybody out. i guess that was what made me nervous about it?
thank you for sharing and subscribing. i put out a new art video every thursday.
i also sell original art, sketch books, really nice prints, handmade calendars, pet commissions,
and even some one-of-a-kind wearable art jewelry. i also have a sketchbook club on patreon where we
fill our sketchbooks according to a theme and some tiers even get original sketches mailed to them.