Art, Design, and Random Shenanigans from HI SEAS 4
New Art! The Wormhole
So I finally managed to finish a new art piece, took a long time to put all this together with thesis and the like, but just took a day for myself yesterday and knocked out the last bits that needed to come together for it. As always, we’ll start with the process!
Some of the earliest sketches, just figuring out how big I’d like the worm to be, should the worm come in from the front or the back of the apple, texture or smooth, you know, getting a handle on things.
I’d had this idea to do a wormhole from way back in Fall semester while I was in China, I have a few little ink doodles from back then which just look like a brain fart, but the idea of a worm going through an apple and being itself made of space and stars was appealing. I mean who doesn’t love a space pun right?
Finally decided on having the worm exit from the front of the apple on both ends, and I’ve started trying to get some sort of composition going. It’s curvy motion around a central object, so it’ll be fairly static to begin with, and I began laying things out to be nice and geometrically stable.
So really it was just a bunch of sketches in my big brown paper sketchbook, until I had all the details down the way I wanted them to roughly be, and then I’d draw a very very nice apple (as good as I can anyways) and get to work in Photoshop. The following was the last sketch trying to figure out placement or organization.
Figuring out the last bits of geometry, noticing that the stem is too high when compared to the base, all the details. This was the last sketch before I laid out the base of the final version on nice white paper.
You hardly need me to babble on about stuff now, so I’ll just jump into the rest of it with a series of photos and little descriptors under each. I mean come on, who reads this stuff anyways right?
Here’s the apple I drew with graphite. Tried to give it a little texture, make a fun stem, and yes I know the bottom looks like a butt. I guess I sorta mixed a golden delicious with a granny smith, and that parentage has a recessive gene for booty. Who’d have thought?Here’s just a super fast color overlay, red/green/brown, and an awful cutout of one of the worms from the sketchbook. Trying to get everything placed so we can start having fun.Little more shading going on, make the apple feel like it has a pinch of depth, and accenting the apple butt, because that’s what I do apparently.Colors on the apple getting a little bit more under control, and a crazy rough fill on the worm so I can just check that off the list.Getting close to done on the colors for the apple, and took just some random space shots and threw them into the worm. Totally not going to be stuff used, but it’s more fun to look at a starry worm than a blank one. Also, notice a few tiny stars floating around the top of the stem. I thought that was kinda cute.Minor apple tweaks, and starting to get the actual space stuff that I want into the worm. I’ve also cleaned up the worm edges, went with a smooth line, and started making it appropriately dimensional.Here you can see I took the planet out of the worm, just wasn’t doing it for me, and have everything filled in with stars and space now. Fun fact, more than half of the stars you can see in the worm are actually taken from a massive shot of our own galaxy. You can’t really tell of course, but they’re there.Last bit to underline the idea of “Wormhole” is the work that really ties the worm and the apple together! Till now they were just sort of next to each other, but nothing connected them. I’ve sketched out some basic lines for two little wormholes, this’ll act as the bridge between the two objects in the picture, hopefully link them together nicely.Now you take those wacky green lines, set them up as a mask ,and put some stars behind them too. You’ve got a rough wormhole look going, though it’s still rather flat…just tricks the eyes a bit.Rough up the wormhole lines a bit, shade under and around the things so they’re not so flat…and done! Hope you like it! That worm is just wormholing right through that apple, haha!
Art-chitecture from Mars 
Very cool! I really liked the planet idea, too bad it didn’t work out. 🙂
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Thanks! I wanted the planet in there too but it always just looked too heavy no matter what I did. Can’t win them all, drat.
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