After Dark

For the Art EOYs last year, we were given a set of themes we could choose from to base our final work on. The one I chose was "After Dark", and this was what I did for my final piece.

I was inspired by M.C. Escher's Other World, on which I based the setting of the work.

So, without further ado, meet our little friends the (sometimes often decapitated) custard buns:

(Click here to view an enlarged image of this)

Doesn't look like it has anything to do with "After Dark" whatsoever, does this?

In actual fact, the concept on which I based this work is that of dreams - the dreams people have after dark. This work basically tries to show the craziness, and basically unrealism of the dreams we have.

Plus a little bit of sadism.

The interesting thing about this work, I feel, is the fact that it doesn't look special at first glance. It's only after one looks at it for a while - and notices the little details - that it starts to get interesting. Many things are happening in the whole piece, and it's not really easy to spot them, but once one does, the whole work somehow seem to come alive.

Trying to add in all these little details was what made the work so enjoyable to create. I had a lot of fun watching people's reactions after they looked a little closer at it. I suppose that's one of the kicks out of making a work like that.

Although it was fun, this work was by no means easy to create. It was the first time I worked with watercolour, and the illustration style. Still, and thank goodness, the final piece didn't turn out badly.

These are the initial sketches I made of the custard bun character:

What's this whole "custard bun" thing? Here's a sketch of the actual bun:

A custard bun's an actual dessert, which falls under the dim sum category. It's delicious, extremely unhealthy, and, for first-timers, often consumed with entertaining results (involving custard spilling out in a fairly violent fashion).

Then, more sketches of the character in now various states of decapitation, this time done in marker:

Why decapitation? To tell the truth, I don't know. Somehow, when my brain got the idea that these buns could bleed custard, it told me to start murdering them.

Then I made some sketches of the moon I was planning to use in the setting:

I had a lot of fun with this, too. However, these drawings were done with watercolour and marker. It was the first time I worked with watercolour, but I didn't have much difficulty painting these drawings because they were pretty small.

Then came the actual setting designs:

(Click here to view an enlarged image of this)

(Click here to view and enlarged image of this)

(Click here to view an enlarged image of this)

These are the scenes that are happening out of the "windows" depicted in the final piece. There's another drawing I made of the shadow on the wall, also used in the final piece:

I had quite a lot of difficulty doing these. I wasn't used to using watercolour, and the first time I actually used it properly was to do the sketches of the moon. I couldn't control it properly, didn't know how it was supposed to look, and it took a few tries for me to get the right feel.

Thankfully, in the end, I managed to get the hang of it.

Below are sketches of the bed I used in the centre of the final piece:

These sketches are actually the very, very first ones I made in this illustration style for the whole work. I didn't purposely learn how to draw in this way. I'd just seen comics with this sort of shading and style, and decided one night to try it out...

And it worked.

More sketches:

After all that hard work, in the final days of preparation for the exam, I came up with this:

(Click here to view an enlarged image of this)

I think it was a pretty good attempt, but the colours were uneven, and this piece looks much less exciting than the final piece.

Which brings us to the final work, the beginning of this post.

I really did enjoy myself while doing this work, but it was definitely quite a challenge. I hope you like it as much as I do, and please do leave your comments!