Obsession

I totally forgot to share with you guys my latest artistic obsession and how it turned out. I spent a couple of months being obsessed with pandas. They are so exquisite, so beautiful and so foreign to anything I get to see here in New England. I love them. Doesn't help that I live with one....


Okay, maybe she's not a panda but Kita-Bear and Petit Panda are some of her many nicknames! Just to show you the tortured mind behind the artist.... (click on the pictures to see them larger)

First I thought a panda with a parasol would be cute.

But the parasol drove me nuts.

Then I switched to an idea of a human child hanging out with a real-life animal (yes, as an artist I am allowed to live vicariously through my artwork, thank you very much!). So I decided on a little girl and a panda having a tea party. I loved how the panda turned out. And really liked the color scheme I decided on but I could not decide on the background scene. Should it look like a messy playroom? Should there be lots of furniture when most of my drawings are simple? And then I drew the little girl two small. She looks to be about 7 instead of 4 or 5 like I wanted her to be. And compared to the giant panda, the girl and her tea set all seem miniature. Toyed around with just finishing it and them fixing things in Photoshop but that added another layer of questions and decisions. So I put it aside.

Still feeling obsessed and inspired by pandas I came back to the idea again and decided that I would keep trying until I had an illustration I liked. Which meant starting all over. Worked hard on practicing little girl faces and bodies that would look young enough. Changed the perspective of the panda and ditched background furniture for crazy wallpaper. (And somewhere in there the little girl changed ethnicities.....I have no explanation for that one...)

So what do you think?

I was putting a lot of pressure on myself because I'm focusing on building a solid portfolio. So of course I had all these criteria that I wanted to meet which only makes the decision making process worse. I'm pretty happy with the result but I still love the beautiful face of that second panda. And the final product still isn't perfect. Oh, to be a perfectionist and an artist.

I've been obsessing about something else entirely different lately. It has nothing to do with my artistic goals but has become a greater and greater obsession of my heart as of late. I'm hoping to share it with you in the blogging world soon.