Style1½ inches thick (3.75 cm) Product Details Artist grade canvas, archival inks, wooden stretcher bars, and UVB protective coating
AvailablityUsually ships within five business days. ArtistDeborah Miller CollectionSimply
Description Inspiration comes in every form so here I'm sharing something that at first seems childish but for me it was poignant. I was doodling in Illustrator and in a few seconds had this face sketched. I do this sometimes to work through whatever, and I'm the master of control-a control-z until I'm ready to make the work stick. This time however, the eyes on this sketch were sort of alive and compelling. I deleted it and then about 15 minutes later decided I had to have it back (thank you undo button). I thought the whole thing just looked ..well, sketchy, but fixing it felt wrong. I decided to leave it as is and play with the color and had a hard time with that too. I don't mess with skin tones very often, they don't have meaning to the type of art I enjoy creating. But this one, I tried hundreds of colors before opening up the skin color palette. I tried every one and there was a gradient with a rich cocoa brown fading to a chestnut red. It felt right. For some reason I added another layer and colored that with my skin type (considered 'white' but in terms of Adobe Illustrator, well it was about the fifth tone in - kind of light peach and pink and some light brown undertones). To that I added a texture - some kind of metal, I think aluminum. I tried different blendings until the last one, 'mixed', felt right. I wasn't paying much attention to anything in particular, just doodling and playing and going with instinct. My daughter came in at that point and said 'oh wow, that's Martin Luther King Jr, we just read about him.' I leaned my head back and tilted it to the right (why is that always the considering pose?) and then I could see it. Then I put the image together with the process I'd used to create the coloring, impacted by the message - it takes all of us working together and a strong will, to make it happen. What is 'it?'. Everything, I guess.