: Cherry / Drip :
This is one of the first pieces I made with the intention of actually putting it out into the world. Just having that intention changed something. It made the work easier to move through, and it’s helped me keep going in a direction I didn’t fully understand yet.
I didn’t start with a clear idea of what it would look like finished. I just started sketching the things I love to draw, trees, clouds, water, suns, playing with different shapes, letting them slowly find their way into each other. I’ve always been drawn to that, taking separate things and folding them together until it borders on absurd, and losing yourself in the small details, the ones where every person who looks at it ends up seeing something different. That’s really what this piece is about. Even though I have my own version of it, a story, a thread, a reason it exists, I don’t think it needs explaining. It’s for whoever looks at it to build their own meaning out of. That’s the whole point, as far as I’m concerned.
Mostly I worked with a thin pencil for the sketching, working out shapes and details, sketching loose, abstract lines that aren’t anything yet, and letting them start to suggest things to me as I go. Then a thicker pencil for the rougher outlines, and a flat, wide shading pencil to bring in shadow in a slightly different tone and texture. The dark in the tree mostly comes from a thick charcoal pencil I picked up recently. I’d only used it in a few small private pieces before, but I got pulled in by it, and this tree felt like the right place to really lean into it. To finish, I went over everything with three different fineliner weights, building up the stippling and some of the outlines, layering it step by step. That’s what gives it the separation within the cohesion. That’s the part that, to me, actually brings it all together.
I’ve included some photos from the process, mostly to show how rough a beginning can be, full of different ideas that shift the more your own thinking shifts. I hope it says something about persistence, and about going easy on yourself. Every piece starts somewhere, and nothing begins as something you’re particulairly proud of.
I’ve carried this piece with me on my travels, sold some prints along the way, and the world has been kinder to it than I expected. In a way, that’s turned this piece into an ongoing lesson in trusting what you make.
