Art. Deco. Prompts. When the idea hit me I thought it was brilliant! Then I asked myself what kind of masochist I really am… but that’s how it is with prompts. My poor little brain rides a rollercoaster every single time. In the end it was the perfect solution to the lack of a project I had for Art Deco month.
What is Art Deco?
I don’t think I touched on what Art Deco is enough when I wrote about Tamara de Lempicka earlier this month. She was an Art Deco painter, but Art Deco was mainly an architectural and decorative movement, and here we are making digital Art Deco. For the sake of making sure there’s a real definition this time, here’s a blurb from Britannica:
“Art Deco is a popular design style of the 1920s and ’30s characterized especially by sleek geometric or stylized forms and by the use of man-made materials.”
The Britannica link there has a good overview of the style. Now let’s move on to the thing I did…
What Are Prompts?
If you haven’t seen one of my streams where we do prompts, I have a handy little command that grabs a random adjective, noun, and verb and posts it to chat. Whatever comes up, I have to draw. Sometimes the verb requires another prompt, like grabbing. What is the subject of the prompt grabbing? So we run the command again and things start getting weird(er).
Usually I don’t keep track of the prompts after they’re done. It’s fun to see what viewers think they are and to go back to the old ones and try to remember what I was supposed to draw. There are some that I really have no idea what they were supposed to be!
This prompt is different because it has a record. But this is the only time and place I’m going to put what it was.
skinny clown thinking, strong house mowing
At least I’m pretty sure that’s what it was…
The Project
I knew I wanted to work with black and gold lines for the background. If you do an image search for Art Deco you’ll see gold with either black or dark blue quite a bit. So after a quick sketch I started laying down lines, starting with a diamond in the center to frame the prompts that would be put on top. From there it was all intuitive – I just kept placing gold lines where I thought they looked good. It was sooooo relaxing. Seriously, try it. It’s so zen!
Then came the clown, house, and mowers. At first I wasn’t going to shade them, but they really needed it. If you look at vintage Art Deco advertisements, the figures generally are lightly shaded, so that’s what I did. It was very love-hate toward the end there, but looking at it now I’m really happy with how it turned out! What do you think?
