Most of the surrealist drawings I've done over the past three years have contained relatively dense imagery with a lot of different figures and objects intertwined, and I especially pushed myself in that direction with the line art for Moments After the End. However, I felt I needed a break after that one, so Cultivating the Bloodline is a bit different and much more pared down in terms of composition.
The inspiration for this imagery is relatively straightforward, which is that I think the process of human reproduction is bizarre. In fact, the older I get the more baffling the process becomes. I often think that if mammals reproduced in some other way, and then a science fiction author described childbirth in the way it happens in our reality, it would be incredibly weird and unsettling to read. Grotesque, even.
Or maybe the fact that it's real makes it even more unsettling.
I should clarify here that none of this is meant to denigrate motherhood or the process of childbirth in any way. I'm actually in a stage of life where I'm feeling motivated to start a family, and I think a lot of what's coming up for me in Cultivating the Bloodline is my own fears and concerns about health complications during pregnancy and childbirth, and more broadly the fragility and messiness of our fleshy human bodies.
So as with all my art, I took the kernel of my thoughts/feelings around the topic and tried to expand it here through a lens of dark fantasy, emphasizing elements of mysticism and horror to express some of the discomfort I have around the process.
Also, I speculated a couple months ago in the pencil art for Amidst Reverie and Doubt that any sort of machinery and tubes/wires in my art tends to reflect some amount of overthinking and worry on my part, and that seems to hold true with the imagery in this one.
Because Cultivating the Bloodline is so pared down in relation to my other art and there isn't a ton of visual problem-solving to talk about, I decided to roll the first three stages of the process (pencil, ink, flat colors) into a single blog post and just mention a few notes about creative decisions I made along the way.
In terms of the drawing itself, I think it's worth contrasting this one with the image I made immediately before it for Moments After the End. That drawing was completely free of hatching and contour lines, which means that every ink mark in it is either delineating a form or creating a shadow. I also essentially drew and inked the full thing digitally. Here's a detail for reference.
It was a lot of fun to work in that way and I specifically felt it helped give the art a sense of calm and peacefulness, but for Cultivating the Bloodline I wanted to bring back some aggressive cross-hatching and work with pen on paper again. I like that style here because it gives the image a messier, rougher feel, and I was hoping the art could have a little more agitation and discomfort in it.
Also, although there were minimal edits made to the ink art after I scanned it into Photoshop, one revision I made was shrinking the mother's head down. I had deliberately drawn the head large, but it just felt too huge to me, so you might notice a difference if you compare the pencil image with the ink and color stages.
For color, I initially planned to work with a lot of yellow and yellow-greens to give it something of an alien horror vibe, but once I got rolling I found it nice to incorporate warmer earth tones as well, as I felt they connected more with the fleshiness of the image. So I tried to find a balance of those two worlds, the yellow-greens and the warmer pinks and reds.
Color was also much easier this time around due to the more straightforward composition. That was particularly true compared to the color palette for Moments After the End, which was honestly a struggle due to how dense that image is.
I've just finished the final color for this one, so I'll share that soon, and I'm now planning to break away from this type of art to make fully analog paintings/mixed media pieces instead. I've wrapped up the last of the work needed on the "old" art and will try to post frequently here to get caught up. (We'll see how that goes.)
In the meantime, I wanted to leave a few thoughts here about recent life experiences and the importance of owning my shit. (Or trying to, anyway.)
In October of last year I felt like everything in my life was moving in a great direction. Work, art, dating, fitness, money. It seemed like all the hard work I'd put into recent years was paying off in a really satisfying way.
And then everything fell apart on me. For most of December, I felt like things at work had suddenly become stressful and complicated – with my supervisors as well as a female co-worker – I also wasn't being authentic or brave enough in dating, and I suddenly felt very poor financially. I had even become inconsistent with my art. (Fitness was somehow still going well though...)
Without getting into details about those things, I want to reflect on the importance of taking ownership over life, as it became easy during that period to point the finger to outside conditions as the cause of my troubles. But I tried to hold onto the advice from my homie Wayne Dyer about taking responsibility for everything in our lives, good or bad. I then started watching Alex Hormozi vids on youtube and he is particularly intense about the idea of "my fault," as in, "it's my fault, it's my responsibility."
Not in a self-pitying way, mind you, but as an empowering form of ownership. And in the case of all the frustrations I've encountered in my life recently, it really is my fault.
Any time we point the finger at someone or something outside ourselves as the cause of our troubles, we disempower ourselves to make changes and take control of our lives. So I had to swallow some shame, push past some embarrassment, and take a pretty hard look at things in my life that I was unhappy about and say, "this is my fault."
Since then, I've moved into a nicer apartment, found a higher paying job, switched to a new gym that's closer and less crowded, and decided to make a big shift with my art. (I also continued to destroy my relationship with my co-worker until our friendly connection finally died. So, you know...still not perfect.)
But I do want to leave a note here for my future self and anyone else who reads this that any time we're tempted to say we can't or won't accomplish something because of various reasons outside our control, it's always best to stop and say, "it's my fault." And the pain and guilt and anger that comes with that honest realization can be incredible motivation to do better.
That's all for this one, next month I'll have the ink work for the fantasy art piece A Tale of Tension and Reverie. That one took longer than expected because I initially began inking it on paper and then started over digitally in order to refine and edit some of the small details, especially with faces.
I can't not see the item in the mother's left hand as a wicked-ass skull bong, though I'm sure it's not. Cool stuff!