So sticking with the fantasy theme I seem to have for all of my art, I chose one of my favorite childhood movies, Flight of Dragons. The beginning of the movie has a theme song written and sung by Don Mclean, famous for American Pie. I chose the lyrics of that song as my poem, since I'm terrible at poetry and can't stand half of it anyway. I then hand traced a still from the first scenes of the movie, during which the song is sung, with the pen tool. I was able to then fill the tracings with text by putting the text into Illustrator and exporting them as jpegs which I would then create patterns out of for the fill tool to use.
Dragons are cool.
This is really interesting to look at. The dragons feel like cutouts, as though the page had been cut into all these dragon shapes. I wonder, then, about the text, which feels a little less like a page because of the repeated text. I wonder where the text came from, and if doing a cutout of that whole larger text might have been more interesting? Like the bottom right dragon feels a little more that way, and the half dragon on the right. I'm not sure I can come up with a reason for why it transitions, but that white "margin" down the middle of that last dragon is really powerful because it makes it seem even more like the middle of a book. These are, of course, my obsessions.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy the childish element coming through in this piece; the dragons seem as if in detail they would appear silly and cartoonish, but choosing to capture only their silhouettes casts a bit of elegant magic on a potentially risky move. The green text is also a great choice, especially that shade of green which is not quite natural in commonplace nature and frequents fantasy. That being said, the repetitive lyrics are not as imaginative. I feel compelled to connect to the storybook aspect of the image but there is little intriguing in repetition: perhaps you could tease us more with snippets of an actual story taking place in the cutouts of these dragons. What fascinated you about them as a child? Imbue them with that power using text, and fill them with the mysteries they deserve.
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