No. 213: Raising The Image

I generally post these drawings when everything is all cleaned up and put away.
This time, I chose the moment of completion --
because this one was all about capturing a moment.

Cindi can call it what she likes. In my catalog, No. 213 is "Daddy's Girl."
Click on all images to enlarge.

My original brain cramp, when first considering this project, was to call this chapter, "Perfecting The Image." It's a phrase that I see every afternoon at work, as does the woman who hired me for this project. It's a little phrase that a computer burps out every time it turns on as it adjusts itself for a regular 4 p.m. meeting.

But "Raising The Image" works better here for a couple of reasons.  First, the finished product is not perfect.
"It's an approximation of what you wish to see," I have told Cindi, who wanted me to preserve a beloved childhood family memory.
She can now, at least, see more than she could before.

We had kicked around, and I had frankly badgered her about, taking a photo from her childhood and turning it into a sketch. She said the picture was kind of fuzzy.
Ha! The accuracy of a journalist! As you can see, the original is pretty rough.
She gave me two photos from the same time period, the same vacation -- a lakeside cabin in Canada in the late 1950s.

I wanted to draw her playing with daddy in the water. I could see their faces.
She wanted them on the cottage steps. Faces not visible.
It looked like the cameraman -- camera woman? Mom? moved.  Perhaps sunlight fried the image.  There is a lot wrong with this little frozen memory.
So, I took the better picture and flipped it.  And then I blew up and copied those faces, tilted them by some degrees, and pasted them onto the bad image.  I also cut and spliced pieces of door and siding.
So while the drawing is 100 percent analog, some computer trickery was involved.  I didn't get the alignment just right but I took care of those adjustments with my pencil.

Complicating matters is our figuring out, over the phone one night, that daddy is also holding onto a baby doll. Or a giraffe (We went with doll). You may have to look hard to see it. Working from dicey images is a real challenge, and this one was by far the most challenging.

The first thing I did was draw those flipped faces. I knew that the whole project would be junked if I couldn't get them. This led to another problem: It made the drawing bigger than Cindi wanted. But my human hands just couldn't get it any smaller. These are quarter-sized heads central to the larger image. I kept futzing with the faces ("I think my hair was more straight") as I shaded around them and added the background. Honestly the last pencil mark on the finished work was on daddy's face. 

Cindi wanted the whole image, including the family car, which I roughed in, above, and became one of the coolest parts of this piece. I had a little trouble seeing where her dad's pants began and ended; above is a guess -- one refined throughout the process of raising this image.

Right about here was when I sent the night-time baby doll text message.  "What's he got under his arm, tucked up next to you?" I wondered.  It looks like two baby doll feet are hanging down; really I just can't tell and this is one piece that I'm not sure of.  As drawn, you can decipher those baby doll feet and a little arm snugged against dad; the head is hidden under his forearm, tucked into his daughter's back. He had his hands full, it seems. I'm also assuming that's a camera bag, though it could have been mom's purse. She might have been lugging the picnic basket!

With father and daughter in the foreground, I set about building their stage. I could see the bottom of the little cabin in the original photo, but not the top and not much of that door.  There's a No. 20 and a roof line, and a tree. There's what appears to be a cement stoop, with the family car parked up close. I ventured it's a Ford Fairlane. 

Two things that I do love about this drawing are the car and dad's wristwatch.  Can you see it? Man, that's small. I could see some of the siding, but guessed at most of it. Really tried to make it look like wood. I brought the shading around the stoop and dad's feet to a centered point, likely sand and dirt (maybe gravel), to give the finished piece a clean look. The white space sets off the central image.

The roof came last. I could see its shape but not its detail -- just a triangular black mass. So I guessed at how it might have looked. At the end I made a decision to omit the section of cabin off to the left, as well as the tree leaves to the right. Leaving just the roof peak gave the image a symmetry, paired with the tapered dirt and sand at the bottom.  The right-hand side of the roof line was not visible, blotted out by sun and overexposure, so I chose to fade it out.

This is the second time that I have been able to rescue an image. The first example is here:
http://tomwillsproductions.blogspot.com/2010/12/sisters.html
Another example, from a better photo, is here:
http://tomwillsproductions.blogspot.com/2011/09/marengo.html

I'm very proud of these three, because they were requested by friends, and I was able to preserve and perhaps enhance their original vision.
As for No. 213, it remains unframed -- as Cindi wanted to have that done for herself. In this way she will have the final role in raising this image, her image, and placing it where and how she wants, inside of her home and life. I sealed it with a fixative so that this memory, at least, will not smear and should not fade away.

Consider an original.
Contact me at hankbonesman@embarqmail.com or willstom01@gmail.com