After completing a very “tightly rendered” project, I wanted to do something much more loose! I like to look at photos that spark my imagination and inspire me to draw, and I found this photographer/artist – Soraya Jean-Louis McElroy – whose photos really grabbed me.
She kindly granted me permission, and so here are the images I made from her photos. Usually when I use photos for inspiration, I change them a LOT so they don’t look like they are from the photo. But Soraya’s photos were perfect the way they were, so I didn’t change very much.
Part of the experiment was to use colors differently – to let them blend on the paper rather than mixing them myself and trying too hard to get consistent colors, or layering them up and risking the art being “overworked”.
Since I really needed new art for my agent‘s fall mailing, I worked on creating a “story”. Soraya had a series of photos showing two girls, one with a birthday crown, another with a girl’s gap-toothed grin in the shade of a willow tree, and another with two girls walking arm in arm.
So I changed a few things, imagining the girls are walking away from an old borded up house – what if it was Grandma’s?
What if the birthday crown was a treasure, buried in the back yard?
