Sustained Investigation Post #8 - Intrusive Thoughts

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Mark Making

For this illustration, I barely used bold lines or a sketch, wanting it to have a more loose feel to it overall. None of the strokes were particularly planned and to be honest I went into it knowing that purposefully. Everything has a very "painterly" feel, or more organic.

Idea

The idea for this illustration was the concept of intrusive thoughts

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Intrusive thoughts are unwanted thoughts, images, impulses or urges that come out of nowhere and tend to reoccur.1 They may become an obsession, are upsetting or distressing and can feel difficult to manage or eliminate. Intrusive thoughts are predominantly associated with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Tourette's syndrome (TS), depression, body dysmorphic disorder (BD), and sometimes attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

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I had a lot of trouble coming up with a linear concept to describe something I don't choose to feel or think about, something subconscious. It's for that reason I took a more abstract take on this piece, deciding to make it more so to illustrate a feeling then a concept. Being so out of control with your thoughts that they don't feel like yours is a terrible feeling, that I feel like a linear concept can't give justice.

Materials/Technique

I did this piece digitally, doing it in a very "painterly" manner. I have been working on an acrylic painting recently and wanted to see how I could transfer those ideas, techniques, and concepts into my preferred media, digital. I used procreate for this illustration, using a mix of default and custom brushes. One of the settings I used was the gradient maps procreate provides. I did the whole base (as you can see above) with "normal" warm colors but later went in with this feature to simplify the colors to stronger reds and blues. It looks slightly out of place from the rest of my illustrations, but that was the goal.

Resources

I didn't use any reference or concept for this and went purely off of feel. Though I used some of the techniques and layering ideas I used while using acrylic paint for this illustration, everything was done on a single layer, or blended/rendered on the same layer.