Expression

Expression is essentially a persons interpretation of something as they actually look. It's not 100% realism, as there is the artist's style also applied. In this case it's my usual rough pencil with smooth colour style, though the colour was applied in such a way more befitting of real paint than a computer graphic. Since it's a bee, I of course needed to research bees so that I could get the details right. To add a bit more style, I made the scene take place so close to a large flower that if this were a photograph, the camera would need to be inside the flower. I didn't intend for this, but the bee looks kind of cute.

And speaking of cute, behold the raw, unadulterated power of Photoshop!

Abstraction

All right, quit laughing.

Abstraction is obviously taking an idea and messing it up a bit. In this case, we had to abstract it, but still make the object obvious. I figure that nothing fits that bill as well as kids drawings. So I drew a bee with a flower like a young child would. I had to regress a bit, and not think about the way I'd draw something now, but instead think about how a kid might interpret things. For example, I know a lot of kids used to draw a blue line at the top of the paper to represent the sky. And of course, there's faces on everything. It was fun. I tried to make it look like it was coloured sloppily with marker, but it didn't quite turn out like I wanted.

Fantasy

Ok, now we're talking my style! I picked a bee for this assignment just because I wanted to turn that bee into a huge nuclear monster and have it buzz around a city while fighting Godzilla. I totally mutated the bee by adding more spikes and more of an evil look to the regular bee details. He's also got 4 wings. The axis of the drawing is tilted to make things more exciting, as does the fire and Godzilla's radioactive breath. I wish that I had added more destruction and maybe some military vehicles too.

And now, for the terrible, horrible secret.

Before I was going to start on these drawings, I had a little accident. A bit of the tip of my left index finger was sliced off while working on another project. So, obviously, I didn't get around to drawing them at that time, giving me even less time to finish them.

All three of these drawings, from concept to thumbnail sketch to pencils to colour, were finished in one sleepless night.