Le Voyage intérieur
The general concept came after reading about the major arcana the moon from the tarot de Marseille. This is a project I’m lurking on for a couple of years now. After just a short reading of this card, there’s this small idea who pops up in my mind, close to what I doodled. Sometimes it appears like a vision, blurry most of the time. And I quickly put it on paper before it vanished. Sometimes, concepts are harder to get. You got to work hard to extirpate them, like a root buried deep in the ground.
But after more reading, I realized I may have interpreted wrongly the meaning of the card and I decided to not wasted it and try to expand the idea a bit. You still can find the symbol of the dog, wolf and moon but the meaning changed. What about a dog carrying his wolf‘s heritage along with him looking to know more about himself and his nature. How to reconcile both parts of him. And came the idea of an inner travel, a complicated road to himself.
Some doodles to test symbols, dog face and ideas.
Usually I’ll make the final sketch in my sketchbook, but in this case, I’ve worked on tracing paper (at 70 gsm, the paper I found is heavier than what I used to have so it’s perfect to be used multiple time). The maze was the trickiest part. I use the 2 points perspective technic with reference of mazes and lot of trials, errors and erasing to get this one. I felt it was a better idea to draw the character separately, scan everything and try to find the best layout in Photoshop.
When I think every part is where they belong, I print very lightly the outlines on my Bristol paper. They’ll be my guide for the fun part. You can see I printed some crop marks. My final graphite pieces are always 8x10 in because it’s a standard frame size and it’s easy to ship. But because you lose 0.25 in every side when it’s framed (I think it’s called bleed), I’ve also this crop mark so I’m sure nothing important in the drawing will be hidden. I use a paper frame all along the drawing part to help me visualize time to time the bleed.
When the artwork is done, I put a small layer of varnish and resize the paper. Then it’s ready for a good photo (my scanner is shit), some work in Photoshop and voilà! A new piece is born!
*** If you would like to know what tools I use to the graphite part, you can my post here!
