Intuition Process

This is the creative process for my 'Intuition' card. Firstly, I wanted to do something that depicted the way the brain fires in rapid patterns. I think this is how intuition works in a way. The brain fires so quickly, it seems like an idea or a solution to a problem comes from the big blue, but in actual fact, pieces of it have been floating around in your brain for a while. It's just a matter of making the connections.

This lead to the idea to use a crown of stars to show this process. Each star represents a thought node and the lines between are the pathways that form between thoughts.

My lovely colleague / friend, Reshma Gajjar offered to model. I went through her instagram feed and used a variety of photos and videos to familiarize myself with the contours of her face. Then I created the initial sketch.

After that, I painted the mid-tones and the shadows. I used diluted acrylic on water-color paper. For the creative deck, I often use cheaper, light weight paper that is very smooth, so the paint dries incredibly fast. A variety of techniques can be used to create a smoother finish, but in my opinion, I wasn't entirely successful here.

Next, I scanned in the original and added a background that I had painted previously. I also fixed a few mistakes, smoothed out some of the harsher lines and darkened the shadow along the jaw.

Finally, I added the brain/star map using an airbrush in  Mypaint.  I have a drawing monitor with a pressure sensitive pen that works well for this.

Logic Process

I've been waiting for feedback on one of my projects and decided to get back to working on my creativity deck. I'm hoping I might be able to finish it by the time I die...or perhaps sooner! In order to speed things along, I decided to make the card for the Logic entirely digitally. Well, almost entirely digitally. I still did an initial sketch and scanned that in first. Then I finished off the sketch in My Paint.

I did a crazy thing with the brain in the sketch - I wanted it to be transparent, so I added lines to show the signals between dendrites. But I decided it looked too 'star bursty' and would probably be more suitable to the intuition card.

Working digitally lends itself to a smoother more deliberate finish, which suited my android character. I thought it would be quicker than painting but it took just as long! If not longer...because I noodled around for ages and constantly hit delete. Sometimes, when you're painting, you mess up and it becomes a happy accident, or you paint over something, or you start over. This made it so that I never had to start over completely and because it was digital from the start, I didn't have to scan in the final painting.  I created it on my Yinova drawing monitor using My Paint and GIMP.

Suspend Process

I thought I would show the process for doing the background for the 'Suspend' card from my creativity deck.  I struggle a bit with backgrounds because I usually do the main figure first (and I work small) and then need to put in the background later. This time, I decided to do the background separate and then put the two images together in GIMP.

So I did the background and kept it quite light and subtle. Then I added a transparent layer to the initial image and put the two together using GIMP and MyPaint.