I created this personal artwork in September with the following text: “Enough food is produced in the world today to feed everyone, but it’s not the case... That’s the best way to see the total failure of our actual human societies. This is what I tried to represent in this picture. You can help with signing this free online petition www.1billionhungry.org to express your support against world hunger. Done with Mypaint and Gimp on Linux”.
A large movement was created around this artwork with thousands of blog and social websites sharing this visual message. A lot more never expected from an artwork.
That’s why I propose you to discover the making of behind “Yin Yang of a world hunger.”
TRADITIONAL
The idea of this artwork was born in the metro of my city. When I was back in my home studio, I speedily sketched on a ‘post-it’ yellow paper and glue it on my desk. It often happens to me to have an unusual idea and leave it on the corner of my drawing table to see if it’s not a whim of the moment.
Day after days, this little post-it bad sketched idea watched me working with always the same intensity. So I decided to do a digital painting of it, even if it’s not really adapted to my ‘Fantasy’ portfolio.
First step was to do a larger and better version of my original sketch. (The original post-it sketch was thrown to garbage just after finished the cleaned one, too bad for the making of). The above photo created today while writing is a reconstitution of the tools used.
The paper used is an A4 page for printer. I used on this one a hard pencil as H, a black liner pen 0.1 and a black marker to fill some area. I used the eraser to brighten some part darkened by the pencil.
I scanned it with Xsane on my canon Mp560 multifunction printer at around 150 dpi. I didn’t look for grabbing a hi-resolution version of the picture, but I wanted to use it as a guideline. 150dpi is really fast too and make the transition from the drawing table to the computer less painful in my opinion.
The scan is cleaned and cropped with the tools of my picture viewer Gthumb. When the acquisition work is finished, I can open it in my main program: Gimp to start to prepare it for digital painting.
GIMP - PAINTER PREPARATION
Before starting the digital painting process, I like to prepare my artwork with few tricks to make it easier to paint on. Cross hatching lines of my sketch, hard outlines and high black and white contrast are unwanted effect of the scanned picture, and to break it I apply this solution:
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