Art & Random thoughts - August 13, 2023
Drawing the biggest f&$king castle ever...
This past week I finished Towering Gothic - it’s both a new piece and also not a new piece — because I started working on this one back in 2006…
Ah, 2006. Myspace was the place to be, Twitter was barely started, Instagram didn’t even exist, and everyone carried flip-phones in their pockets. Also that year I decided I was going to pursue the humble goal of drawing the biggest f&$king castle that had ever been drawn. A humble goal for sure. I spent a whole lot of time that year brainstorming and sketching ideas for it…
Once the forms took shape, I developed a few precise outlines for it…
Then spent a year or so producing a full 3 dimensional outline…
Then in the winter of 2008 I drew this version from it:
After staring at this for a few months I wasn’t quite satisfied with it, so that summer I drew another version:
I liked this version a little more, but still wanted to do better, so I scanned it and played with it in photoshop for a bit, and came out with this:
This one felt more like the big f&$king castle of my dreams. I uploaded it to DeviantArt (the only real social network at the time for art) and considered my goal to draw the biggest f&$king castle sufficiently satisfied. It got picked up as a Daily Deviation that summer, which was the most attention any of my art had gotten until then (and it would be the most attention any of my pieces got for another 10 years or so…).
So then earlier this summer I rediscovered the outline for it in an old portfolio and decided it would be fun to do a new version of it.
I made a few modifications here and there - gave it more gothic details, and tried to give it some better structure in spots where my old plan didn’t really work for me any more.
Then I realized I needed to give it a new backdrop - something subtle that wouldn’t distract from the main subject — but it made me rethink, where does this castle live? Previously I’d planted it alone among mountains, then in a field surrounded by towns, then I thought… maybe it lives in the water. Surely, that would be a strategically sound place to build a big f&$king castle — after all, many castles around the world are surrounded by water for their defense, and I wouldn’t want my giant castle to be invaded that easily. That would just be a nuisance.
So there’s the final version of this castle, more than 15 years after I first started it. Maybe in another 10 years I’ll do another version and redesign it yet again!