This is a drawing that I made a while back. I kind of consider this to be my "masterpiece."  Is this the best drawing that I've made in terms of design? Maybe, maybe not. If it isn't, it certainly is very close.  But there is something about this drawing that is certainly a sentimental favorite of mine. When I see this drawing, I just like it. Does the size of this have something to do with how much I like it? Well, yes. But whatever reasons. I like this one. Read on....

The Basic Form:

I had been working on this drawing for a while.  I don't know how many drawings I had gone through to find the perfect one, but quite a few of them.  Sometimes I would start to get something that I like and I would make some modifications, but would eventually discard the drawing.  However when this drawing popped up on the screen I said, "This is the one!"  I just like the way this drawing flows, so I scaled the drawing up a bit.  You may ask, "Why are there spaces between the drawing?"  Well the next picture should explain this...

The Scale:

This kind of explains why there are spaces in the drawing.  The drawing is so big that I can't find a printer that big!  I have a plotter that is 36 inches wide and can make drawings up to 20 feet long (1 meter by 6 meters), this is pretty much as big as plotters get.  If you make a drawing that is too big to fit on a single piece of paper, the program will break the drawing up into strips automatically.

Sometimes I bring my pictures to a job interview to show them what I have developed.  A number of times I have been asked, "Where is this picture taken, is this your house?"  I want to say to them (but don't), "If this was my house, would I need to look for a job!?"

A Close Up (with the Friend of the Penguins thrown in):

Just to show a bit of a closeup to show you some details of the drawing.  One thing I really liked about this drawing is the sense of movement and how the parts of the drawing appear to twist and turn and to come in and out of the page....Yeah.

One More Closeup:

This is a closeup of the previous picture to show part of how the drawing seems to undulate back and forth.  One of my favorite sections of the whole drawing.

Overview:

I designed a metal frame and hung the drawing by a series of cables so that it balanced just right and it will move whenever it caught a slight breeze when someone would open a door of the art gallery (which is one other reason that it has to be done in strips, you don't want a 14 foot by 12 foot piece of paper that hangs...it would turn into a sail.  This isn't a good thing for an art work).

The drawing actually has two pieces (and two phases).  The main phase is the four pieces put together that are shown in the first few pictures.  The second part of the drawing is the fifth piece in the foreground.  The four panels are done on paper while the fifth piece is done on a frosted mylar.  I had attempted to do the drawing on mylar at first, but the plotter that I was using at the time just wasn't up to the job and I only got one piece halfway finished.  Two years later I had access to a new plotter that allowed me to finish the drawing on paper, but not mylar.  I included the piece on mylar (even though it was incomplete) in the installation because I kind of like the history of the piece (plus the mylar piece was really cool).

As far as the plotting time of the drawings, it took 12 hours each for the two middle pieces and 9 hours each for the two outer pieces.  I had to work four nights in a row starting in the evening and not finishing until the middle of the night.  If I was to make another drawing like this today it would take me at least twice that long since the materials that I use now, while of a higher quality, take longer to draw on.  Well...it is done and now belongs to the ages.