Cigarette Butts

This piece is part of Just Cause at Electric Keychain. This time we chose to illustrate subjects that we feel strongly about, or that we feel need to be addressed.

There is an abundance of comments I could make about this topic, and the feelings that inspired me to draw this. But at the same time, I drew this to show you how I feel, not to tell you. So I won't.

Instead, I will recount how this piece came to be.

I originally made this for an Editorial class a couple years ago. While it was one of my strongest pieces, it sadly did not "fit" into my portfolio by the time I graduated. So I decided to revisit it with my current technique.

Choosing to redo pieces is always a conflicting decision for me. There is much I could learn from making an entirely new piece, but on the other hand, there is so much I have learned that could go towards fixing past pieces that I just can't resist sometimes.

For once, this rework taught me that there is actually very little I had to change about the original illustration. I had planned to make tons of changes, mainly in the colour scheme. And once I did... I realized that it was much stronger without all the alterations. At one point I was afraid the whole endeavour had been pointless. But ultimately I did come out of this with a better illustration, one which can now go into my portfolio.

So rather than a rework resulting in a piece entirely distinct from the original (which is my usual intent with reworks,) this turned out to be more of a polishing job, and even then I am glad I did this.

Here is the graphite drawing, pre-Photoshop. Those tick marks took almost 2 hours.