I’m not quite sure how the idea popped into my head.
I’ve recently been doing both guided and non-guided (i.e., through sound) meditations. Part of those meditations are primarily so I can nap (*cough*), but also to encourage that mysterious part of the mind that gives rise to creativity to emerge.
This is how I came up with ole Jesus and the Devil having an “encounter” in the deserts of Judea; the image of Sysiphus accidentally dropping his stone (Je Suis Desolee), and a host of other weird illustrations. like the “What you need to let go of” trilogy.
Here’s one that I did recently. I think the original concept came out of a meditation session. Anyhow, I decided that the most freeing way to do this, and do it quickly, was to not worry about creating a conventional one-pager but turn to my sketchpad. My goal was to remain as free and unencumbered as possible, with limited tools, loose under-sketching and none of that over-detailed rendering I fall prey to. I leaned into beautiful thick ink lines and allowed the audience to do the heavy lift of interpretation.
Instead of scanning the images, I shot them on my phone’s camera. Then I imported them into Clip Studio Paint for lettering, which was about as technical as the whole process got.
The whole thing took maybe a month, total, with me only committing to drawing when I felt like it, and it felt really good to lift some pressure off my shoulders. And so far the reaction to this has been pretty good.
Here it is. Untitled.
I hope you enjoyed it!