The art. Dreams of Things #279
Today I’m going to write about one of the recent pieces that I’ve made. Dreams of Things #279. Another of my “Covers to Comic Books That Don’t Exist” series. I’m closing in on finishing 300 of them. Wow, that’s a lot.
It’s May 17, 2025 as I write this and I finished this cover on March 25, 2025. So it’s almost been two months since I’ve seen this cover. It’s a funny thing but usually after I finish a cover I tuck it away. I put it on my easel behind some other 11×17 works on paper that I’ve done. Then when the time comes to make my weekly comic book haul video I pull one out to show. Often the one I pull out I haven’t seen in a month. So it becomes fresh to me.
That was the story of this one this week. I hadn’t seen it since the end of March. It’s familiar to me now because it’s been the one in front of the stack for a few days but on Wednesday it was a new sight. That’s an odd thing for a piece I made myself.
The first thing I notice about this piece is that it’s more poster-like than usual. The space of the image is very flat. It has as much of if not more of a graphic design quality than an illustrative quality.
The pose of the woman reminds me of a fashion ad photograph. It doesn’t give you a full figure in space but just a part of her body with the arms outstretched as if she’s posing instead of standing. Plus her arms are cropped at the sides of the image. That’s more of a graphic design cropping than a figure drawing cropping.
Then there is her hair. It’s an impossible hairdo. It’s being upswept as if by an unseen wind machine like they use in fashion photoshoots. It’s a pink hairdo that matches well with the purple dress. I was just noting this week that though purple is often a tough color to work with and get to print well (when coloring digitally) it’s a lot easier to work with when paired with a pink. Pink and purple together go down smoothly.
Adding to the flat sense of space is that small boy at the bottom of the piece. Is he in front of her or is he a design on the dress? To me his size seems a little bit off for him to be a real person in front of her. He might be a little bit too small to be real. But if he is just a design on the dress the color of him makes him stand out from it. His primary color outfit doesn’t fit with the tight fitting purple stripe design of the dress. He stands out a lot. So maybe he is real.
These search for answers are usually part of my work. I like to come up with images that no one has seen before. Strange stuff that makes me question what it is and what is going on. Often I don’t have all the answers and there might not be a right answer. Like this. It’s up in the air if that’s a real boy or not. It’s something to contemplate.
The top portion of the background and the bottom portion fight each other. The bottom portion is more illustrative and that looks like a normal sort of space behind her. There is a horizon line to give a sense of perspective while the eyeball signs sit down on the horizon. There is nothing behind the signs except for dark blue clouds. It all makes sense as a scene that goes back in space.
The background on top is much more of a graphic design space. There are three stripes of color that don’t create a real space but an artistic one. First are those three color green stripes that go across. They suggest trees or mountains but they don’t line up with the horizon line on the bottom. None of the stripes on top match the horizon line on the bottom. They exist in their own world separate from it.
The orange strips on top go back in space and could possibly suggest a ceiling but it doesn’t match anything else. The horizon line of that ceiling would be somewhere in the middle of the woman’s face and not on the bottom. The hint of dark blue strips up top are slightly off from the orange stripes too. The blue stripes are slightly curved. But they’re barely visible and don’t affect the space much except to anchor the deepest space on top.
The space of the woman in her dress is a mix of illustrative space and graphic design space. Here face and neck have a bit of roundness to them. I used lights and darks to define her skin in such a way as to make it look a little more real than all the flat color around her. It looks like she’s popping out of a flat dress.
Once again this reminds me of a fashion style photo. I wasn’t thinking of that when I was drawing this but now I can see it. There is a certain style of fashion photo, often uses in ads, in which the model’s skin is lit to be very round and sculptural but then she’s wearing a dark dress that’s lit to be flat. It’s a type of photo that’s often done in close up and emphasizes the graphic design of the ad. I haven’t seen one of these ads in ages but it obviously stuck in my head.
One last thing about this cover that reminds me of a fashion shoot is the yellow triangles that are at the side of her head. They remind me of big dangling fashion earrings. They’re not attached to her ears and are floating where earrings wouldn’t even really be but they still read as earrings for me.
It was a conscious decision to put those there and I think it worked out well. I think that was the icing on the cake that pulled the whole thing together for me as I was realizing the graphic design/fashion direction I was going in. One final touch.