The Rifle

Happy New Year everyone! I was kind of happy to see 2016 go. It wasn't an especially bad year for me personally but it was a bad one for a few people I care deeply about, and moving on to 2017 feels like some sort of closure. I don't know what 2017 will bring but here's to hoping for nicer things!

I spent one of the first days of the new year working on another song illustration :

This one is for 'the Rifle' by Alela Diane, and it's maybe one of my favourite songs of all time. The lyrics have some very clear imagery going on, but I wanted to be less literal with my interpretation. I tried to picture the idea of a threat coming from the woods by drawing a giant wolf/fox thing sneaking around a tiny house. This was one of the easiest illustrations I've done in a while, as in, the process from idea to final result was super quick, apart from agonizing over the position of one front leg for fifteen minutes and a half-hour nap.

The wolf/fox and house were cut out of black paper and scanned, I then cut out around fifty little trees and photoshopped them in the background (so I had more control over the scale and could create a sense of perspective). At first I had placed the trees closer together so there would be more overlap, but this got too crowded and took away from the monster a bit.

Anyway, that's a whole lot of ranting about the endless dilemmas I face while drawing. I like how this turned out, and here's the song for your listening pleasure: