The Messenger

I'm very excited to show you my new digital artwork The Messenger and the process behind it.
It was just released in conjunction with the Change showcase going on at Makersplace,

The whole process took me just under four weeks. You may have seen me working parts of it on stream over at vimm.tv and twitch. It's not unusual for my works to evolve in different ways during the drawing process so it went quite naturally with the theme of the contest. So,this is a little bit different from what i've done before. I've picked up some influence from the NFT/cryptoart scene; The glitching and animation seem quite popular methods and the contest provided me a perfect excuse to try them out. This is also more about external observations and heavily noting the current events, specifically the black lives matter protests. There is a lot going on in this work besides that, but it's an important aspect. Because of that i promised to donate half of my personal earnings from the sale to appropriate charities and same goes for this post. That's the introduction and i'll show some of the process after but here is the final artwork:

The Messenger

And here is the process shots

As usual the drawing started with random scribbles that would turn into something

And this time it was a bird, something like a crow.

Through my window I saw some heavy smoke outside. I checked for news and there had been a forest fire earlier further out and there was a warehouse burning closer that was letting out some toxic fumes.

So there was an emotional reaction to the idea of the forest fire and physical one to the little bit of smoke getting inside and irritating my eyes while drawing.

I thought i'd make the crow out of smoke, which turned out taking quite a lot of effort.

There is a little reference to get the smoke closer to the real thing, also some notes. like chapter of the book i was listening to and little hi to the chat as my mic wasn't working. The events were getting to me stronger by this time and it came more clear that they would go into the drawing somehow and it started to make sense.
I was listening to some Bad Brains after few people reminded me of them, and it had an impact here.I thought it was a good idea to make the trees grow out of the city,
which was kind of cool, with a little bit of that punk aesthetic, but ended up changing it later.

Then there were the masses of people coming together in peaceful protest which was very inspring sight, though the violence and looting seemed to get more attention. so i decided to put the crowd in here.

from that picture i made my first real glitch work, using a text editor. I thought it was pretty interesting and might have made a piece on its own. I did my first animation test with that but kept working on the drawing after that.

I made the division of forest and city here. It might be problematic in the context of assigning negative/positive meanings to colors and how they can be further assigned to people, which is certainly not my intention. There are symbolic meanings to these colors though and the inspiration came from the High Priestess card in the Tarot. I didn't quite get the pillars decorations working so i left them out,hoping the idea would come through anyway.

The final elements were the excavator there,digging away at the subconscious, new foundations perhaps, and the helicopter flying above assessing the situation and putting out the fires. The statue being torn down ties the work more to the current events, but also symbolic of any old structures we hold in our minds that might need to be cleared away.

And thats the final drawing, i struggled some time with what to put in the middle where everything was pointing to. Until it clicked what the whole scenario was about, so the scale just seemed like the perfect fit.
The last part was to make the animation, I used the frame from earlier as i liked it so much. I thought about leaving just the drawing after all the extra detail i had added, but ultimately thought to stick to the plan. For me it is reminding about focusing on the present and that nothing is permanent.

The Messenger

There it is, it will be up for sale as 1/1 limited digital edition in July at makersplace
If you like to see the rest of the artworks submitted to change showcase in cryptovoxels
here is the link to the gallery
https://www.cryptovoxels.com/play?coords=W@473W,1U,284S