Smooth Side of M O O N

I’ve been drawing quite a bit — for a good 5 years straight now, and I’ve learned many things. The first lesson: I should’ve never stopped after elementary school! The next: manifesting takes time.

On my own, a little bit out in the field, and still, there’s so much more to learn, so much more to craft. Upon realizing that it never ends, the thought of that rarely ever becomes a negative. A bit stressful, sure, but a good sorta stressful (thinking of eustress right now) — when actions toward developing skills and realizations through arts and crafts, literature and more, create endless growth, new techniques are forged.

Within that time, I’ve been developing styles that convey my stories best. Something that presents anatomy and form – familiar but not entirely grounded; structure without limits, landscapes unaffected by neighborly minds, so on and so forth. And let’s just say, this guy’s gotten pretty far with matching imagination to paper / imagination to digital. With one such bevy of thoughts, came to be finally realizing the silver-eye casting through nighttides. However, this piece came out to be quite unique, as my flow of drawing things out became reversed — from digital screens w/stylus to traditional ink on paper. In fact, the making of Licorice: a poetic experience was entirely a digital one compared to Concept’s Forever, which began traditionally. It wasn’t jarring, if anything, it felt more like witnessing my reflection on a faraway crystalline sphere – I’ve made it to that echelon yet my roots continue beyond question.

To this day, though, I’m still a pen to paper sort of a guy.

Now, the moon affects everybody and everything differently, so I am not going to attempt defining how she affects anybody. But her visage has always captured me in the middle of minutes, before I would learn what she is. And up ’til now, you’ve probably noticed the pronoun I gave the Moon – which is due to how her historic significance across many cultures all over the world, note themselves as rather feminine, sometimes motherly, sometimes nurturing. Also, that very femininity is, what I too, personally feel against my soul. It’s beyond words really, moreso a song that can’t be normally sung, and yet the tune soothes. Don’t worry if you haven’t understood it. One day, we all will.

And so, I wanted to finally create an acquainted form of the Moon — the way my mind envisioned her, the way my soul felt her, the way my bo—you get the point. I’ve been thinking about such a task for a long while, but particular narratives had higher priority… Still, this proved for good cause since the time and commitment only expanded my skills. Enough to give Moon a permanent shape.
I drew her silhouette (which *spoiler alert* could be seen in Licorice: a poetic experience) and a “microformus” backside (*cough cough* accompanied by Licorice in the “Licorice and Moon” piece available in Fine Art America…*cough cough*) in that order. With finally, a frontal, alongside a face reveal.

Well, how does she seem?

I embedded some of the evening to midnight to pre-sunrise colors onto her person, while also giving off this ghastly luminescence she tirelessly echoes. Her gaze soft and experienced – her eyes sharing her echo. As such the flecks spread throughout her vigorous form, to encapsulate eons upon eons of meteor-handling (and we should be grateful). Like this, moon becomes M O O N — the spacing between letters mirroring the distance between us creatures, and the Earth, emboldened, similar to her presence outshining even the stars. I could go deeper and further but I’ll keep it subtle, if you will. After all, she fills that void enough for us to ponder.

If you’ve read this far, my apologies if you were expecting something more “in-tune”, like the book / poems themselves or M O O N’s relationship with Licorice. But this section was mostly about the illustrative side of the celestial figure. Her “Smooth Side” – spot what I did there?
If you’re curious for more analogies, a probe into my style of things original and inspired, or simply, more zanier projects, stay tuned, you lunar head.

*forgive my French 😅