I’ve spent over 24hours straight on my computer in the last 2 days. Truthfully speaking this really was a long time coming. I didn’t go anywhere (except to the supermarket) and just spent all day ‘drawing’. Now I’m inverting it because I’m very traditional when it comes to my classification of artwork in general. My brain finds it difficult to call digital artwork (the kind that was done completely on the computer), well artwork. There’s no paint to be cleared. No pencil sharpenings and most importantly no paper, end product.

All my work (www.emmortel.com) is done first on paper, then scanned in and redone on the computer for the crispness if that is indeed what I want (recently that’s not been the case).

Broken Kode V4: Saida I concentrated on two drawings. The first will eventually form the basis around which Broken Kode V4 is based upon. The running name for that is Saida (as that’s where I actually drew and inked the drawing). When I started colouring this one in, it just felt all wrong. As if I really didn’t know where I was going. I find that choosing the right colours is sometimes one of the hardest things in a drawing. That’s why I sometimes like to flick through all the various blending modes in photoshop, incase a colour contrast works well for me. Saturday I was able to crack this tough nut and get it to a pretty good area, which hopefully I’ll build upon for my mock up.

Human? I’m such a dick. I have less than 4 days to finish this drawing off and actually send it off to the editors. This is for that book I’ll be contributing to. Cutting it terribly fine is a complete understatement. The thing is though, and this is true, I just didn’t have any particular inspiration for the topic. It’s not the topic’s fault, but I wanted this to be special. So I kept writing notes in my moleskin to try and flesh out all the avenues in front of me.

Yesterday inbetween work on ‘Saida’ I got the inspiration and the ideas started flowin through. In fact there were too many ideas, that I actually thought I wasn’t going to be able to incorporate them all. I’m 70% there. Just need one more quadrant and this should be finished.

It’s been a seriously tough weekend, productive to say the least, why is that we only push ourselves when there’s a deadline, rather than taking it easy and doing the job correctly over a decent period of time? It’s not like I didn’t have ample time to prepare for this particular project. Live and learn I guess.