Sometimes an idea takes a while to find a satisfying end.
I always start with the subject: a particular creature, landscape, or relationship. I find inspiration in all sorts of places. In this case, I was leading a botany-themed reading group through a three-part series on potatoes. A fellow botany-enthusiast shared her personal experience with potatoes. She worked on farm in Alaska where they used starfish to fertilize the crops, among which were potatoes. She recalled finding the skeletons among the potatoes during the harvest. I was immediately taken by the vision of these star shapes in dark soil against the ethereal, endless, northern summer sky.
Later that year I participated in Fairy Tale Week, a public event on Instagram where the festival hosts post a theme each day for a week and participants illustrate an image or story based on the theme. Underground was one of the themes and I immediately knew what to draw.
Having only a couple of hours in the morning to develop a response before heading to work, I did some quick sketching and painting and cleaned it up digitally. While I liked the aesthetic contrast of the pointy stars and blobby potatoes on the stark black background, the resulting image didn’t tell the whole story.
After some time I did this vertical sketch digitally, and developed it far enough to transfer to paper, but it still didn’t feel right.
A year later, the day before leaving on a trip, it came to me. I did a sketch and drew it on my ipad. It’s all I could work on when I got back.
What I found successful in this composition is how the ambiguity of the ground’s surface integrates the harvester into the realm of the potatoes more than the fully elevational version had. As well, the tighter cropping brings the stars in the sky in more direct dialog with those in the ground.