Exercise: Visual distortion

I was looking after a pair of funny dogs for friends when I started this exercise and drew them in charcoal and chalk from photos I took. I think they capture the nature of the dogs; Yuki, the black and white one, is small (this is exaggerated by the view from above), intense and fluffy in a feathery way. And Lola is sleek, elegant and a bit mad in an obsessive way.

 I chose to work with the Yuki image and set about redrawing her in five lines, first with a pen in a series of freehand sketches

and then in photoshop with my new tablet, using the original drawing as a guide. I drew about ten versions on different layers, the first was a bit rough, understandably as I’m a tablet novice,

 my favourite was the eighth version, 

which I then refined slightly

And collaged

The textures I collaged were descriptive; leaves for the ears and tail, satin quilting for the tongue and a play on words; dog tooth check for the body, and I chose human eyes as Yuki is known to be more human than dog at times by the people who know her best.

I redrew the collage

• I didn’t get the hang of the dog tooth check (by drawing the black instead of the white) until I reached her back end. I should have practised this before embarking on the drawing.
• I think it would work well if it was redrawn properly because the balance of white would be heavier than the black, also some distortion of the pattern would emphasise the contours of the body
• The human eyes drawn over the Buddha hands work well in a haunting and surreal way and the lightness of this part works as a good contrast to the darkness of the rest of the image.
• The knitted snout works well but there isn’t enough contrast between that and the flower I used for the nose, which I would replace with a button to extend the textile theme.
•  I think the foliage works well for the ears and tail although the flowers on the tail are less effective than the ivy leaves. My first idea was to make the tail from feathers as Yuki’s tail looks like plumage but I was sidetracked by the ivy and flower image. In the redrawn version I will use the feather metaphor, incorporating the research I did for my tattoo exercise.
• The tongue works well texturally but is perhaps too detailed for the size
•   I decided to add a zip to extend the textile narrative and to turn the ‘dog in a bag’ fad into ‘dog as a bag’.

I think this image works well in black and white, the check is more even but it needs cleaning up and the addition of a background. I duplicated the image, adjusted the brightness and contrast and set the layer blend mode to multiply.

Then tried it with a black background

I’m very pleased with this version, it still needs cleaning up a bit but it’s a good start. I think the quilted tongue, button and zip draw the eye through horizontally.

I’ve never redrawn collages before, this was a revelation, collage material can be a great source of the surreal and redrawing it pulls all the elements together. I was quite disappointed with my first drawn version because of the poorly drawn check and balked at the idea of redrawing it but then I got ill and spent a few days in bed with not much energy for anything else and this pencil drawing whiled away a few hours.

6 weeks later, I've just cleaned up this image and blurred the edges in photoshop