#sketchiestsketchbook | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mysticsparklewings · 5 years

Photo

Designiest Design

EDIT 11/8/19: The results are in; my design is one of the winning 5!! Thank you so much to everyone who voted, even if you didn't vote for mine! Congratulations to the other winners, and thank you to Culture Hustle for the contest opportunity! EDIT 10/16/19: Culture Hustle has picked their 10 favorite Designs for the contest, and I'm number 9! You can vote for which of the 10 selected you'd like to see as one of the 5 winners over on their Facebook Page OR over on their Instagram! I can't wait to see who the winners are, even if my design isn't one of them. ____ What a world where I'm uploading two contest art pieces back to back This time the contest is hosted by a company called CultureHustle, which is in cahoots with an artist named Stuart Semple, over on their Facebook and Instagram Pages. The details this time around were infinitely less specific than they were for my Nightlights in the Deep piece, so I had infinitely more room to play with ideas, which as any artist knows can be a bit of a double-edged sword. The goal of the contest is to design a cover for their product called the "sketchiest sketchbook" and...that's it. They give a deadline (October 1st) and tell you there'll be five winners and what they're going to do with the design, but that's really it. And honestly, it may be a head-scratcher to some, but to me this comes across as a very fitting way to do it, considering the attitude the company portrays on their website. (Go check it out some of the product descriptions or the About page and I promise you'll see what I mean.) I originally came up with two concepts, both pretty similar and very inspired by the company's vaguely "fight the power" impression and spunk, as well as their origin story. (The short version is that another artist claimed all the rights to the blackest material on the planet for their personal use only and Stuart Semple, as well as many others, didn't like that, so Stuart went into making his own "x-iest x" art products that are available to everyone except the aforementioned blackest-black hog.) So pretty right away my color choices were pretty obvious; Black for Culturehustle's own attempts to make the blackest black paints as well as a nod to the origin of the company, and the pink, blue, green, and yellow after their Powder Paint Pigments: Pinkest Pink, Loveliest Blue, Greenest Green, and Yellowest Yellow, which seem to be more of their claim to fame at the moment. I also would end up adding in a few hand-drawn sparkles to reference their "Most Glittery Glitter" that is actually glass and sounds very cool but I personally would be terrified to use it for fear of getting all that teeny tiny glass in places it shouldn't be. My concepts from the very beginning were kind of all hand-and-magic themed, the hands representing more or less the "hands of the hardworking artist" and the magic...well, that's the art the hands create, of course. The other concept I came up with I was having an excruciatingly hard time finding references for the position of the hand, so that was what ultimately pushed me to this one instead. So we have the hands of the artist, the black void of nothingness, and then the bursting colors and valued tools that fuel the fire of creative inspiration. And while originally I thought of doing completely clean digital lines, while I was working it really felt like the sketchy/rough lines contrasted really nicely with the more rigid solids of the black and the color lines, and it kinda fits with the idea of a sketchbook cover a little better, so I went that route instead. I also kept the less refined shading on the hands since I ended up really liking the way it looked next to the rest of the design. Although I do have to disclose that the hands aren't anatomically correct as far as positioning goes; technically speaking both thumbs should be on the same side (try posing your hands this way for yourself if you don't believe me). But I tried doing that a few different ways, and it just doesn't look as good. The balance feels a lot better to the eyes of the thumbs/positions are opposite. So in the name of having a more attractive design over a more accurate one, I made the executive choice to just let them be opposite. (And admittedly there's probably very few people that would've called me on that, but it was kind of interesting to me when I figured it out for myself so I thought it was worth mentioning.) This design ended up being a lot simpler to take through to completion once I had the concept nailed down than I thought it would be, and it was actually a lot of fun. Especially since I hadn't done much digital stuff lately; it was a nice little warmup to get back into the swing of things, I think. It's one of those pieces where less is more; I feel like there's a surprising amount of depth you could read into it, for as simple as it is. Here's hoping I've done the design enough design-y justice to place in the contest, but honestly I like it so much and it was so enjoyable to make that I'll still be happy just to have it for my own use even if it doesn't. ____ Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble | Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

#sketchiestsketchbook

14 notes · View notes