I was asked how I do my drawings. I’ll show you a part of the process – some of it I keep proprietary because I don’t want every Dom, Hick and Tarry copying it. This gold-on-black drawing is the end result of a long series of alterations:
In the first images, below, you can see I used a quadrant setup – where there are four iterations of an image pivoting around a central point.
This is the initial sketch for the energy of the piece. Can you find the singer, the flute player, the cat, the howling wolf, and the pianist? They will become more obvious soon!
I went from white on black to black on white, and then into various colors.
The second part involved separating some of the elements, clarifying details, and making them into a repeat pattern. Then making color variations.
Can you see the various musicians more easily? And the cat, and the howling wolf! The singer and the flute player have little red marks at their mouths, showing their breath. The red dots are the energy, the music, the fun, the juice!
Now that I have the final color version, I go back to the final black and white, and remove elements and place them so they make a continuous pattern, moving upwards on a twisty path. Like this:
After the white-on-black version is done, I invert it to black on white. Then I play with colors – I like to make a blue version in case someone wants a toile-ish wallpaper. And I am particularly fond of gold on black, so I finalized with that one.
In some of my designs, the variations add up – I’ll end up with close to a hundred variations! Other times, like JAMMIN’, I’ll only end up with about 30 images total.
Then I make them web-ready, and choose which ones to share. I really like the gold one, so that’s my representative for this theme.
I hope you enjoyed seeing the evolution of one of my drawings!
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Here’s the post I made when I first shared the image:
JAMMIN’!
Tonight I felt so sad. What are we DOing on this lovely planet? Why are we stupidly fighting fighting fighting when our lives could be so sublime! Humans do such incredibly stupid things.
So I went to youtube and found some of my fave music videos and played them so loud my ear is ringing. Yup – one ear – the other is out of order.
But at least I feel better. Music gets it! Nothing like it!
What’s your all-time fave tune(s)?
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JAMMIN’
© Angela Treat Lyon 2025
Read more of my stories here:
lyonlyon.substack.com