DMA179 Artist Research Assignment - Inspirational Pieces

For this assignment, I was tasked to research the artist Jon Burgerman, and create two pieces of art inspired by Jon's style. Upon looking at his work, I quickly realized that someone with my level of drawing expertise would not be able to come close to the level of detail portrayed within. So, instead of getting my inspiration from the style of drawing itself, I drew inspiration from the emotion that I felt when viewing his work. I found that Jon's artworks made me feel like I was in a surreal world -- lost and confused. Kind of like an acid or a mushroom trip. His characters had features way out of proportion, and wacky legs and arms.

In the first drawing, which I'm going to call "NICE ONE", I drew inspiration from the disproportionate faces in Jon's drawing to create a quirky guy with a huge head and a dis-positioned smile. After sketching out the head, it almost seemed imperative that I made his body an extremely thin stick body, with a comedic "ultra bro thumbs up/fist bump". The humor just seemed to fit so perfectly with the expression on the character's face.

In the second drawing, I drew from the lost/surreal/hallucinogenic feelings I got from his paintings. It's a character with extremely large eyes featuring unnaturally dilated pupils to give the drawing a hallucinogenic effect. The character's limbs are all loopy and wonky because it makes the picture look very "trippy" and surreal... and of course, as with any good trip, there is a color explosion from the center outwards coming from behind the character.

The final pictures are the one on the far right as well as the one in the bottom row, right side. The rest are just sketches/ideas leading up to the final versions.

JON BURGERMAN'S WORK CAN BE VIEWED HERE: http://www.jonburgerman.com/