I'm writing a short story for school, its a 'Fear and Loathing' styled paper on my adventures at the Bonnaroo Music Festival. My assignment is not only to write the story, but also to illustrate it. I'm not a very good writer - I pretty much suck at writing, but I'm trying my best. To go with the wild (drugged up) story, I've done a handful of very "out there" illustrations.
None of these illustrations are very close to my "norm" in terms of style - it's been very fun for me, but the results are somewhat frustraiting, though - it seems alot of people expected a particular thing from me, so once I popped out with something so different - they were either thrilled or completely disapointed. The worst part of this project has been trying to gauge people's responses.
:-\
Here's the title, which I inked -
(http://theartofbradsmith.com/BURST.jpg)
And my name, also inked -
(http://theartofbradsmith.com/Brad%20Smith.jpg)
Along the way to Bonnaroo, we saw a number of cars that had "Bonnaroo Or Bust" written on their windows with that sloppy "glass chalk" paint stuff - for whatever reason I decided to name the story "Bonnaroo Or Burst"... There's really nothing else behind the name. Looking at the cars that had been painted on, I somehow made the connection to Ralph Steadman's sloppy paint style - so I went with it. I think it works.
In one bit of my story, I witness an alien dancing across a muddy lake... Sound freaky? It was.
(http://theartofbradsmith.com/Alien.jpg)
This is inked and then watercolored. I know, it's a little weird - and the drawing is not the least bit 'realistic' - but the experience was so unreal, it'd be wrong to try and depict it as anything but crazy. I like it, especially the feet.
Here's an illustration depicting my encounter with a Mud man...
(http://theartofbradsmith.com/Mudman.jpg)
This is completely inked with brushes and pens. The mud man was having a really bad acid trip, or something. His whole body was caked with mud, his hair had dried up with mud to the point where it looked as if he had small branches growing from his head, so that explains that.
Here's my encounter with a Peacock woman.
(http://theartofbradsmith.com/Peacock.jpg)
It doesn't really look like a peacock to me - more like a large ostrich or something - but I don't care. Right now it's only inked and has a light dab of acryllic on top of colored pencils, but I'm going to go in with markers and really mark up the vibrancy of the colors.
Lastly, here's a crazy guy climbing a big tree...
(http://theartofbradsmith.com/TreeClimber.jpg)
This happened during Jack Johnson's performance. A guy climbed up this huge tree, in the rain, and eventually fell - only to get back up and climb it again. I really need to figure out a way to add rain, but I'm not sure what'd be the best way with ink... any tips?
So, do you hate it? Like it? I'm honestly pretty nervous/anxious about how this is going to turn out - so all feedback is greatly desired!
Thanks for all of the replies, you guys - its really good to get feedback.
Here's the latest piece I've done - this is an illustration for a particular scene where I, in the eyes of a druggy, am engulfed in the flames of hell. Or something like that. I did three seperate illustrations, which were dropped in together.
(http://theartofbradsmith.com/HellsGates.jpg)
The first is an egg-shaped Nazi. This took only a few minutes, as I was only trying to come up with something bizarre but at the same time pretty freaky/scary. I used red acryllic for the blood.
The second is a self portrait. I came up with a dumbfounded expression, as I'm not seeing any of this scary **** happening - but am being seen through someone elses eyes. I love the expression. I used photoshop to drop a nice distancing shadow in, in the same way I would do with an airbrush - I think this makes a nice pop-out/pop-up effect.
The third is some sort of banana-headed nazi, slashing a dagger around. It's all very self explainatory. The arm band is red acryllic. For this character I did something that I thought was a little more deep than with the other two - I tried to crosshatch his sleeve and chest in the way you might see a geographical map crosshatched. Something of a 'global' effect. I don't know if it worked or not.
In the background of all of this, behind the smoke, is jagged plates of glass, or rocks. something of a cliff. I originally planned to put Disney at the top of the jagged mountain, as a little homage to Thomas - but decided against it... didn't want it to detract from the focus - me and the monsters.
Thoughts on this?
Eventually I may post a sample of my writing, but I've never been to happy about my writing...