Mr Owl – Week 6

Hello everybody!

This week has been quite unusual. It started on the 7th of November. And it was more than a week, as it lasted 9 days. And this is what I made :

« What? That’s it? 9 days to make this picture? Is that a joke? »

Hold on, demanding reader. Here are some explanations : Since the beginning of Mr Owl, I’ve posted a picture every day, made little games when possible, and tried to interact with my audience in a fun way. This time I wanted to do that all at once, and reveal a big picture by posting little pieces of it every day. Which made me want to do a little puzzle. I won’t post the daily retrospective, like I normally do, because having a look at the final thing is probably more interesting. But I’m going to walk you through my approach. First, I thought that an accident was a good scene to be broken down in little bits. Usually people report different versions, and my grandmother used to say « There is always a minimum of 3 reasons for an accident to occur ». I didn’t really show these reasons, and maybe the piece would have been more interesting with them, but oh well… It’s done now. I started with a blank square, as usual. I made it 9 times bigger than the normal resolution for a Mr Owl drawing and separated it in 9 equal parts like so :

Then I added construction lines. I knew I wanted the camera to be looking downwards so I used a double point perspective with the horizon line far up away from the canvas.

Then I drew a rough version of what’s happening in the scene. The challenge was to fit characters in boxes, not leaving important part of their bodies/expressions in between 2 squares. And that was the main problem of this project : how to propose pieces that both work individually, and fit inside the larger canvas. I don’t think I did that great a job, but these were interesting problems to work on.

Then I isolated a square and drew a clean version of it. I posted this kind of things on my facebook page :

And when you put them side by side, you can see that it’s not seamless, but still a good foundation to work on. Something like that :

Then after a little polishing, there you have the final image :

And voilà! This project has been weird. I was really excited when I started, and as time went by it became more and more frustrating. The size of the image made the process harder on my computer, for example I had to pause 10 seconds every time I saved the file, which may not seem like a lot, but I learnt (the hard way) to save my work every 2 minutes. In the end I’ve lost a considerable amount of time that way. Also, I’m not really pleased with the look of the final image. Especially the guy on the right omg, it’s ridiculous. And it took a total of 9 days to produce that. I guess that’s where the biggest amount of frustration comes from. In 9 « normal days » I could have produced better drawings if they were individually released.

On a more positive note, I’m really happy I came through, and that it still worked. I think it is very interesting to think of new ways to deliver your art on social media, mostly because it still hasn’t been explored so much. So I might do another version of this kind of thing, but I will either do something else in parallel, or a shorter version of it, maybe 4 pieces. I don’t know. Can you guys please let me know what you thought of it? I see that it received a really low amount of engagement from you (likes/comments on facebook), which isn’t a problem and was to be expected, but it gives me very little information.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I’ll be away for a couple of days, so Mr Owl won’t be back before next Monday. Until then, take care!

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