Illustrated Surrealism Inspired by Nature

1. Intro To Surrealism Inspired by Nature: Hello, I'm arch insomnia on social media. And I like to illustrate lots of fantastical, surrealistic or images I'm inspired by. And aspects of reality that can be more twisted and shifted into a shape that is different from what people accept as real. Because the imagination is just a diversion from the reality that we know, but it is based within it also. I think that to come up with our own fantastical images and worlds, we do draw inspiration from nature. So in this class we are going to find three objects in nature that inspire us and then melded into a final form within our minds. Then we work this form into a composition, make a few practice sketches, and then work on the final illustration. 2. Finding Three Objects that Inspire Us: First, we will decide on three objects in the natural environment that we will incorporate into our illustration. So you can either think of three on your own or you can follow this guided meditation to find three objects that you would like to incorporate or design with. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath and see deeply into your seat. Allow your eyes to rest and your fingers to go. Then your whole body relaxes and sugars called reaches in and settle. Gently. Hold within ourselves. A little wall of inspiration. A little cotton ball holds things that we wish to work with. Gently fluff the cotton ball is slowly separate the fibers. Just say cotton ball or it is a dandelion poof, they're a little fibers. Be slowly, slowly pick it the fibers and look at what it highlights. Eventually, something pops out. And where we grab a hold of it in our mind and collect it for later. Then we keep ticking through this little dandelion pool for cotton ball. And a second object pops out. And eventually we drop within the ball itself, within the emptiness inside of it. And we look around and see if there's anything there. We find our last object and we carry it out with us. We let it combined with the other two that we have discovered. And then we hold onto these three. Awaken back into our home setting. 3. My Inspirations: I am inspired by my Venus flytrap plant. So I decided that this would be one of the elements that I incorporate. Here's my video. So you can get a good look at it in case you might want to dry it. Also. I thought it would be fun if the Venus flytrap was like a pet dog and then you could interact with it, headache or something like that. I also thought, what would I feed the Venus flytrap? Right now, it just gets fungus gnats, small books, but I wanted to feed it something bigger, like a grasshopper. The grasshopper would probably have a look of terror while being fed to the Venus flytrap. I wanted to give it a human face so it could show its terror in horror at being eaten. That okay, I will draw the Venus flytrap as a dog and it will be fed like a human face, grasshopper. 4. Guided Meditation to Transmorgrify the Three Objects: If you're not sure of how you want to combine the three objects. Here is a guided meditation that can help you. So holds a 3D objects in your mind and see into your seat, lifting your hands up as if you're holding these three objects in-between them. Slowly. Sway your hands back and forth. Move your arms all around. Imagine yourself mixing the three objects. A little pot of golden liquid, thought liquid, maybe it's golden, maybe it's rainbow colored. It is your thought liquid. And it's just going to stir. And stir. As a three-hour objects combine into mind, soup, amorphous, in shapeless. Then gradually. As they melt into the one. The one allows the three to shift into something else. Something forms in this image and gradually lifts itself up, up and away from the Coltrane from which it came. The liquid hardens and turns into a solid object. You pick up this object. And we return to our reality with our trophy or image that which we shall illustrate. 5. Finding Reference Images for Studies and Sketches: So now that you have your three objects in mind, we should first do some life studies or sketches so we know what it looks like before we either combine it or draw the final image. It's just always good to practice. So what I recommend is that you either look at the object in real life if it's somewhere near you, or you go online and look up stock images that you can practice sketching. I recommend royalty-free places like Pixabay. And that's where I went to look for the grasshopper images. I went in there, typed in grasshopper. So all these grasshoppers also typed in dogs sitting because they are dark because I wanted to make sure that I still could draw a dog. And what I did was for the Venus flytrap, I already have one, so I kinda looked at it and I decided to go ahead and draw dogs with the Venus flytrap as its head. Like just practice sketches. I just wanted the Venus flytrap on its head. I know it could have had multiple ones popping out of it. So it can be a dog with multiple VNets by chops, melts, popping out. But to keep it simple, it has one big mouth and that's the head. So here you can see me sketching out the dog with the Venus flytrap mouth. And then eventually I sketch out some grasshoppers. And then I add the human face. I wanted to draw different expressions. So I looked up angry faces, scared faces, and I sketch those out also. I decided to make my final image in ink. I inked over the pencil sketches that I made. And here you can see me inking in everything. It's always good to practice a little inking before you fought, before you work on the final image. Sometimes my hands are unsteady, sometimes they're called, sometimes I'm nervous. And the practice of practice thinking or sketching, inking sketches helps my mind settle, helps my mind prepare and helps my body settle into a good rhythm. Because do move around a lot in the way we hold the pen, the way me move, the way we sit. A little practice helps our body settle into a position and emotion or rhythm that works well and improves our workflow. 6. Constructing the Final Composition: Once you have the image of the three objects combined in mind, then sketch out a few preliminary sketches about how, what, how it could look and what it could look like, how the objects could be. The final unison of the three objects can be laid out like what type of composition is there any action? Where is everything going? If you follow the guided meditation, there is a final object in mind that you hold. Still sketching. A couple of practice thumbnails is helpful. I knew what I wanted mine to look like. So I just started sketching. What you see me doing in this video is just inking the final sketch. Since I was going to have someone feeding the dog, my main concern was how was this person going to be posed as they were feeding the dog? And also how was the dog going to be posed? So I did sketch the dog a couple times and I decided on a position I wanted to talk to you. As for the person feeding the dog, I did a few sketches of the figure next to the dog in a couple of thumbnails that aren't pictured. I will probably add the whole process in another video, another class video, or in another class itself. And then I drew the figures final pose. It helps to do a couple of sketches if you're not sure, and to practice the opposing so that you get the right armature depending on how realistic or unrealistic you want your image. I have a lot of experience in figure drawing, so I just started to draw a fairly realistic figure, except I didn't want this person to have a head because that way I don't have to draw head. You don't have to draw another face. And it's a surreal image. This person does not need a head. It'd be more interesting, more fun if they had their head cut off. There's like a little neck like stuff sticking out. But I gave it a clean cut. I looked at reference images for the body. I actually have a book on comic art. Manga are specifically how to draw the male body. Then I also went online and looked up fitness models and weightlifters. So depending, make sure you look up the, what you want to draw. Like e.g. the human figures complicated, very muscular people look very different from very skinny people. In very chubby people look different from very skinny people are very muscular people and all sorts of things. And people have all sorts of different proportions. I have a torso and then I have legs with clothes on it. Looking at preferences for clothing is also important because folding is complicated. It moves, it folds in certain ways. A lot of experience illustrating this kind of stuff. So I just went directly into the final sketch. You can of course, practice a lot more if you want to. Then my Venus flytrap headed dog was pretty simple. When I finished the final composition, I realized that the grasshoppers actually really small. So you can't really see its face anyway. So I tried to render a face, but you can't really tell it has the human race. He just has a horrified expression on it. I think if I want it to continue with this and draw maybe a little comic, I would over-exaggerate the face and have scenes with the grasshoppers really zoomed in on where it just becomes bigger than everything else before it shrinks back into a tiny little thing that fits inside the Venus flytrap smell. We can come up with all sorts of things to do. When we illustrate surrealism, reality can be stretched beyond its limits. We can have lots of fun.