Beginning Memory Work

So...while I am still working on ideas and drawings from the Metawhimsical stuff...I have been spending time with childhood nostalgia and trying to capture some of those memories as ideas for new work. I struggle with the fact my work becomes sort of illustrative, but it is partly because of materials I am working with and partly cause, well...I like illustration. There has always been an battle in my brain about the way I want the images to look, and how I want to work with the ideas, especially since memories are distorted images it is hard to pin down how I want these to appear to a viewer.

I started writing down memories I want to have images of and the list is pretty long. The first sketch I did was about time spent in the doghouse with my childhood dog Blacky, the fear of people at the car wash behind my house and how someone murdered my old dog Snoopy at our old house and memories of the fact I could see the blood in the snow. Here is the quick doodle for that. I need to think about color and scale more:

 

I have a tendency to think about the darker things and want to work to remember all the wonderful things in my memory bank as well. So I started to remember going outside to my swing set as a child and pretending to fly. I would imagine the anthills around me as little cities I was flying over and was fascinated about the way ants worked. Of course there was still the fear in the back of my mind about the people at that car wash and if they were coming to get me. This was the sketch for that idea:

 

 

I started to flesh this one out and here is where I am in that process:

 

 

Part of me really wants to make this messier...and I might...but I am enjoying the work on these ideas.  I feel like there might be a way to satisfy my dual nature of illustrator and painter by creating the same idea in different mediums and methods. For now I will focus on the illustrative work and quite the messier self that wants to make this all gooey and fuzzy. I will give that voice some images later...