So, here's the finished piece I submitted to the Soul Powered Art Show that I attended in Jacskon, MS. It was awesome. I haven't participated in an art show in so long.

It started as a pencil drawing on 2 sheets of 8"x10" card stock paper. I combined the images usinig Photoshop CS2 and also used it to do the digital painting. That was an adventure. ~gkaiou offered a lot of helpful suggestions along the way, though. After I was done, it looked pretty plain in the background, so I scanned a page from my recycled paper sketchbook and applied it as a multiply layer over the whole thing.

I painted from reference photographs. The legs were more specific to the actual reference, but Natalie Nouveau was more creative. I'll be posting the references in scraps if you guys care to see (lemme know). I'll also post some detail shots of this. The text is taken from the Oxford American Dictionary program that's on my computer. I did a screencap of the text and applied it to the image in another multipy layer. It featured synonyms of the defintion of "soul", and I highlighted the word "INSPIRATION" with those red arrows you see.

The idea of the piece is pretty conceptual. From the start I wanted to do something with a romantic theme, because that's just how I interpret most things. So, I drew the picture of the couple's legs, and then added the clouds that I've come to like drawing. But, with those elements, the piece was far from finished. Kendall had done this piece that's very popular ([link]), with a girl with an afro wearing headphones. So eventually, I came up with this image of Natalie Nouveau, and combined her hair with the clouds to make a transition between the two images. The headphones signify music. As an artist, I get a lot of inspiration from music. But it also represents how certain music can remind you of specific moments in your life, moments that are special and close to your heart, or soul. These moments, in turn, can inspire your art.

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reference images: [link]