Trystahn Turner | Project title

Cherub

One night while me and a couple of my friends were hanging out at their place, we started talking about tattoos. Despite not having one myself I’ve been surrounded by them my whole life. My dad has many tattoos, including a whole sleeve on his arm that he got over many years. I really like them but have told myself I’m going to hold off for the time being. Mostly so I don't get something stupid that I regret in 10 years. I think I got that from my dad, who despite having many tattoos, has genuine thought and meaning behind most of them. He uses his tattoos as a way to express how he sees himself and to highlight parts of his life. One of his favorites is a leg tattoo shaped like the superman logo, except the inside of the logo is my initials. It's by no means a super complicated tattoo but it means a lot to him and I think it's pretty cool too.

Regardless of the fact I don't have any tattoos it's fun to think about these things, and my friends and I did just that. That night they went into detail about these ideas they've had, and in my case trying to flush out a concept for one. It will likely have something to do with frogs but that's about as far as I got. My friends on the other hand had been conceptualizing their ideas for quite some time. They both spoke about the inspiration for their ideas and after they introduced them we went back and forth giving each other ideas to make them more interesting. This art piece is based on one of those ideas. A biblically accurate cherub, albeit with a darker theming than usual. Aside from the basic concept and a couple required features, he gave me creative control over it, and I went a bit more crazy than I was expecting.

Over the course of many weeks I spent time refining my skills at drawing things like eyes, wings, and hands in preparation to tackle this beast. I burned through many sticky notes and sheets of paper trying to find the best angles and how to make each element stand out on its own. I still have many of the practice drawings as well, hidden away in a bin somewhere.

Many stickynote drawings of eyes, hands, and wings

Across the many years I’ve been drawing, nothing got me as hooked as this drawing did. Something about the aesthetic and the difficulty of drawing many small hands and wings was so fun. The practice I got was well worth it and quite enjoyable so this was definitely one of my favorite art pieces to work on.

Practice makes Perfect

Before I worked on any concept art I first wanted to make sure I was up to the task. For most people drawing things like eyes and hands are really challenging, and I'm no exception. I kept that in mind before starting and decided to give myself as much experience as I could, even if it wasn't directly related to the final product I was aiming for. I got help from many people, asking for tips on how to improve my linework, shading, and proportions. Honestly the proportions part was the most challenging to get used to. I tend to freehand my art which can be a huge pain when dealing with proportioning, but it just feels the most natural so it's what I stuck with.

Another way I got practice was by doing smaller drawings for people. At work I would sometimes ask coworkers for ideas of what to draw and I got quite a few pretty cool ideas from some of them. Not only did those drawings give me some really useful experience but they also turned out great! One of those drawings in particular still stands out to me. It was a small drawing of a set of hands cupping a few rooted out flowers. The style I chose to go with really helped all the small details of the hands stick out.

One of my stickynote drawings of a part of the Cherub

Starting the Design

Now that I had gotten plenty of practice and was feeling comfortable with the objects I was about to draw, I got right into making some concept art. I didn’t want to tackle the whole thing right away and instead chose to make many small detailed drawings of pieces of the whole artwork. This way I could test out how the smaller details would look and what would work or not. Through this process I came up with some new ideas, like the stringy lines hanging from the feathers and body. I also came up with the idea of having small feather-like protrusions from the body of the Cherub. This was something I didn't originally plan for and it resulted in me needing to spend a bit more time on perfecting my feather and wing shapes. I spent a majority of that time trying to figure out the best angles and positions the feathers would be in. Eventually I had a lot of ideas for it and got right back into designing these small sections of the Cherub.

The process of making this artwork took quite some time but I can confidently say I enjoyed every step of it. It was a huge learning curve and it gave me tons of experience. It was also done on my tablet which was something I hadn’t used much at the time. It really helped me build up my confidence in using those programs and a new medium. I would say it's my favorite project I’ve worked on so far.