On the Road to Find Out

Original: 10x13
Medium: Brush and ink
Copyright Notice: Illustration 2016 by Bob Giadrosich/Xiangbala Studio. All Rights Reserved.

The third in my series of textural studies, On the Road to Find Out brings the subjects closer, allowing the viewer to see more elements of design on a personal scale. Half the fun of this piece was rendering the armor and clothing, as well as the various sacks, satchels, and containers being carried as supplies. There is quite a variety of line weights in the characters and horses (thick line in the shadow and thinner line in the hi-lite areas), and I had to keep adjusting based upon the other lines around each character.

The background was an entirely different animal! The first ink on the paper were the two black lines leading straight to the central character. That being the case, I was inking the upper right hand side of the image well before any of the characters were completely penciled. The change in technique from upper right to left was due to the sunbeams (the idea coming very late in the image) needing a different approach, more abstract and atmospheric.

Storytime: I had completely finished the picture, and over the course of a week (or two), I would drag it out and study it for any additional work which needed to be done before declaring it officially completed. Something needed to be done, but I didn't know what it was, the problem being; the right and left backgrounds looked like two different pictures. The right was all dark and dense, while the left was much lighter in tone and more distant. It needed something to tie the two halves together.

Anyway, as a member of Arts of Snohomish, I put in two days a month to "man the store" as it were. On Sunday afternoon, I was at the gallery, two women came in, one being very elderly (92, as I was to discover!). She was visiting her daughter here in Seattle (the other woman with her), from "back East," meaning New York. We have nine members in AoS who currently show at the downtown location, and she was interested in all the different styles and mediums our membership represents, from photography, digital renderings and pastels to jewelry, paintings and ink work. We talked classic illustrators, like J.C. Leyendecker and Maxfield Parrish. Come to find out, she used to teach watercolor at Pratt years ago in New York. She told me that she could not paint anymore, because she used to stand when she painted large, experssionalistic watercolors, but she still loved to look at and talk "Art." On thing led to another, and I showed her On the Road to Find Out.

She mused over it a while, and said, "You know what I think it needs?"
"What's that," I said, smiling at her and her daughter. I didn't know what to think, because of the way she said it, like a secret about to be shared.
She looked at me, almost winking, and replied, "You need to add a dark area down in the lower left hand corner to tie both sides of the picture together. Right now, that area is way too light, and it looks like two different halves."

She was absolutely correct. That was what I had been looking for!!

I told her that when I got home, I would do just that. We talked for a while longer, and they had to go. I thanked her once again, and then finished the image up that evening by adding the dark vegetation behind the horses flank on the lower left hand side. A chance encounter in a little co-op gallery in Snohomish, Washington, with a visiting sojourner from across the country, led to the completion of this image...

Btw, there is one bird for each character. Two of the characters on this journey are yet to be seen.


Others in the series:

Image 1: Hu Zhua Shan: fav.me/da1sn82
Image 2: Hill Song: fav.me/da3cg9k


As always, thanks for looking!