All that you touch and all that you see

When I was preparing to travel to New York I knew that I was going to want to stage door, but I'm super socially anxious and wanted something more to say to the actors than joining in the chorus of "you were wonderful!" So I decided that my artwork could make a good conversation point and wanted to gift some out. Some of my artworks are digital, but for the traditional pieces I don't like the idea of just giving away the originals, especially as you don't really know whether it's going to be appreciated or discarded. I'd hate for something I worked on for 5+ hours to end up in the garbage or thrown in a box with a thousand other fan works and barely looked at. I don't mean for that to sound any kind of way, I just think it's realistic to think like that as these people can't keep everything that they're handed as it would be too much. I decided to get some prints made up, but I didn't want them to look like prints as that feels a bit self promotion-y and gross rather than "here's a thing I drew that I want you to have because I'm a huge fan of you". So instead I had some giclée prints made on cotton watercolor paper as they look like originals and are nice and tactile. It was my first time ever having giclée prints made and it was so exciting seeing them! I love how they came out so much!!

My Wicked drawings are digital and have very dark backgrounds, so to help them look at home and more like traditional pieces I painted some watercolor washes in appropriate color schemes to replace the solid color backgrounds, and because I save all of my digital files with their original layers I was able to simply cut and paste the characters over the top. Because I use a lot of texture on my digital artworks I think this method really worked! I'm obsessed with the level of detail the giclée was able to pick out in my artworks too, usually I just have postcards made of my stuff which aren't super clear. I'd really love to sell something like this at some point as I think they'd look so nice framed together.





I was also seeing Moulin Rouge (which I wrote about here) and wanted to give something to the two leads Aaron Tveit (as he's my all time favorite actor) and Karen Olivo. I hadn't drawn any Moulin Rouge artwork at that point (which has since been rectified!) but I had a ballpoint pen portrait of Aaron so created something similar for Karen. I kind of hate how the Karen print came out tbh, but that's on me because I messed up the levels when I was preparing the file. There's a reason I usually photograph my art over scanning it and that's because I suck at making it look ok! I love the Aaron one though, it looks identical to how it looks in my sketchbook and there's so much detail in the giclée print that you can see every pen stroke and ink blob mark and it looks like an actual original and not a print. And as I only met Aaron it ended up being for the best anyway! He was really kind and gracious and seemed to really like it (and I forgot to tell him I even drew it until he asked if I had, doh! My brain just fell out at having him actually standing in front of me. So much for having my artwork as an icebreaker!)




Giclée print on the left, original drawing on the right. I even added the same tape to give it that extra authenticity 👌
I just wanted to share these pictures though because I loved how they came out so much! Because giclée prints are so expensive and I'd never had the originals to directly compare to before getting my own artwork printed up it was difficult to work out if it was worth the added expense, but now I'm a total convert!