Drawing my art final!

Hello! Game progress is slow as usual and the server is still... resting... but there's still a new creative thing to show you that I've been working on! Yeah, it's an art project for school, but it's also pixel art and I have to write an artist statement about it so I thought it would be fun to just do that here and include some pictures of the process while I'm at it. If you aren't interested in hearing about this picture I drew, you should probably stop reading now.

Welcome to this post! Glad you could make it. If you're my art teacher, you only gotta read the Designated Artist Statement Section™ which will begin momentarily. If you are not my art teacher, you've been legally obligated to read the rest of this post since clicking "Read More." And also you have to buy a Moonrabbit Industries mug. I don't make the rules.

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE DESIGNATED ARTIST STATEMENT ZONE™

I guess I should start this off with the picture I drew. Here it is:

Yes, soak up its beauty. Once you have marinated in its beauty for approximately three minutes, continue to the next paragraph. Any longer and you risk obsession, which would be really embarrassing for you. (This statement is supposed to be 5-10 sentences so I'll summarize the picture here before going into more detail and specifics later on.)

The picture (okay, it's called "Quiet Forest" (I should probably stop referring to it as "the picture")) is supposed to kind of sum up what the pandemic feels like to me. I've had to deal with myself a lot as a result of all this alone time I've been having and that's why I'm the focus of the drawing. I'll talk about why this is set in my bathroom more later but I like the kind of desperation a bathroom brings to mind in this type of situation. To me it conveys a low point. I can't think of many triumphant things that have happened in restrooms. There's also the obvious thing bathrooms are associated with that could be used to describe what I feel like (hint: it's brown and rhymes with "fit"). If the room the mirror's in is my reality, inside the mirror is where my head's at– a vast, empty, dreamlike space that can be comfortable but also lonely.

YOU ARE NOW EXITING THE DESIGNATED ARTIST STATEMENT ZONE™

​The face
​
I've kinda had this image of myself staring at my face in the bathroom mirror feeling like I was gonna explode in my brain since like, August. At the end of a long, same-y day I'd retreat to the bathroom to brush my teeth and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror looking pretty beat up. I don't think I'm an intense person by any means and I try not to take myself really seriously but this repeated scene felt pretty dramatic to me (without being exaggerated) and more importantly worth documenting. So one night I stayed up and listened to my To Pimp A Butterfly record and tried to draw how I was feeling, which was not something I was used to doing. The file I got after drawing for about an hour looked alright so I saved it to a miscellaneous folder on my computer and forgot about it for a few months.

Tired face sketch from September.

Pretty sure this Gorillaz single art influenced the original drawing.

The tired-in-mirror imagery followed me into another project I completed in December, a Gameboy-styled puzzle game I made over the course of 48 hours. It's playable on the Discord server through our chat bot.

​
The room

The bathroom from the picture is in fact real, and tickets to come see it are $20. No refunds.

If you've looked at the other drawing process post on here, you'll know that I start drawings with a black and white single shade outline and then color everything in. As opposed to... drawing shapes of color, maybe? i don't know how other people draw. My point is this should look familiar:

I Gameboy'd the outline to get an idea for how I would shade it and also because the image resolution is the same as a Gameboy screen and I... wanted to see what it would look like. The answer is... very green.

I colored and shaded the room and then all that was left was the inside of the mirror. I was thinking about having the borealis' light pouring out of the mirror at one point but I figured that would be too hard to draw and might upset the color palette a little. I barely understand how light works– I do not trust myself when it's colored.

The mirror

I'm really proud of how the scene in the mirror came out! I didn't think I'd be able to draw a convincing borealis and I was a little worried about the treeline, too. I pretty much just dropped in the face from September and with a few tweaks I think it ended up fitting!

from sketch to finished!

Inspiration

I took a lot of inspiration from music and games while working on this project. The most obvious inspiration is the drawing's title– it shares its name with Hiroshi Yoshimura's 1998 album Quiet Forest, which I discovered a few weeks ago and have been listening to a lot. I think the album sounds a lot more lush and green than the colder, blue drawing, but I think they have their similarities too. A lesser known Quiet Forest comes from the Kirby 64 OST and... man does it make me nostalgic. If you're into ambient/video game music you gotta check those two albums out.

I store the Celeste soundtrack on my desk and I look at the cover a lot while I'm working. I think the blue-grey mountains and trees definitely came from that. While we're talking about Celeste, I think I also might have subconsciously taken the aurora borealis imagery from the Farewell OST's cover? It's up for debate what exactly those space colors are.

The last album cover I took some inspiration from is IGOR's! Tyler does not look like he's in a very good mood.

In conclusion:

Wow! Thanks for reading all this! I can't really judge how long a post is gonna be while I'm writing it cause it gets super smushed and stretched in the editor and always looks like 1000 pages but I get the feeling this one is still pretty long... I guess that's it! Tell me if you like this kind of super in depth dissection type of post, it would be super fun to talk this much about a project that I wasn't getting graded on. L8R

-Henry