Anxiety Series - Water Colour

This is a small series I am doing just for fun to get back into the habit of making water colours on a regular basis. In the series I show how my anxiety has impacted my life. In some of the water colours I give my anxiety a form, a hideous orange monster-like form, in drawing Anxiety this way I am able to visualize it better and it helps to overcome it. I use a comical style to take the edge off the subject matter and again to help to over come the real anxiety I face.

1. Anxiety-Don't Hesitate - Water Colour, 2011
Should be pretty self-explanatory but basically you have a representation of me playing chess against the personification of my anxiety, an angel-winged orange monster that is constantly questioning every move I make. Anxiety (the creature) used to have bat-like wings but I decided to change them to angel wings to represent hope. He has also shrunk a little since his last appearance and lost his tail.

2. Anxiety-Chipping Away - Water Colour, 2011
This one really did not scan well at all because I used very subtle colours but you get the idea I hope. The Anxiety creature is sealed away behind these concrete walls but you can see its orange essence kind of seeping through which has resulted in a very vague representation of my wife becoming suspicious and attempting to see what I have hidden away from her and myself. Our dogs and a squirrel look on in surprise.

3. Anxiety-Riddled with Anxiety, Water Colour, 2011
In seeing some of the bacteria riddled fish at Lake Vermillion in Northern Minnesota, I kind of related to them. It was really how I felt about my anxiety and I thought it was a great way to express visually the anxiety which in the past has consumed me. In the scene, I am represented by the blue fish and my wife the pink fish. She has come to wake me up only to find that my entire body has succumb to the Anxiety represented by orange spots.

Illustration - Reaper Bandana Developments/Final, AI

This series of images should give some insight into how I might construct a specific vector image using various resources to pull it all together. Inspired by a really old illustration I saw of the Grim Reaper sitting on a gravestone with an hourglass in his hand. The client wanted a unique design that was very dark with a contemporary look that still seemed authentic to motorcyclists.

Illustration - Dagon Concepts

These are some concepts for the H.G. Lovecraft short story Dagon that I'm illustrating. Lovecraft was pretty specific with his descriptions of the creatures in his stories so it is difficult trying to create exactly what he described while still creating something unique. I thought at first maybe I shouldn't actually show the creature and instead have just the protagonist's terrified expressions but it was too much fun to resist drawing these gnarly creatures.

The image at the very top is actually a reference to a series of dreams I had for a while where the ocean kept consuming me. I thought it was pretty fitting for the theme of this story.