Epistemic Machinations (Final)

Epistemic Machinations was created during a moment of doubt about my personal growth trajectory and the types of changes I was making in life. Through my usual approach to dark fantasy and surrealism, I aimed to express the uncertainty I was feeling around my new behaviors by contrasting an open wilderness with rigid artificial constructs.

Chronologically, this image was created after Traversing Illusory Sequences and before Ascension, and thematically it falls between them as well. It was also the first piece of art I made since Symbiotic back in 2021 that has elements of nature in it, a theme that has grown with each piece since then.

As always with my finished art, I'll talk about the concept and inspiration for Epistemic Machinations and then get into some details about the actual art-making. If you're interested in the previous steps of the creative process, I've written posts for the ink and flat color stages of this one as well.

The Concept for Epistemic Machinations

This drawing is a bit older now (it's been finished for some time, I've just been slow at blogging), and when I started the pencil art for it in late 2022 or early 2023 I was really pushing myself to learn and grow and develop better habits in life. Some examples of that work include trying to be less critical, more optimistic, a better listener, be tidier in my home, push myself harder with diet and exercise, as well as build a more consistent meditation practice. Those things sound pretty simple, but they required some big changes in how I was thinking about myself and my life at the time, particularly in how I was showing up around other people.

I was immersed in self-development books and podcasts and was doing a thing I learned from Benjamin Franklin (which I continue to do occasionally) where I dedicate each week to the cultivation of a particular skill or behavior I'm deficient in. I create a note card with a theme for that week and include a handful of bullet points to clarify how I want to approach the new behavior, and then I read the note card several times throughout the day to remind myself to act in that new way. I have a fixed number of themes (usually around eight), and once I complete the final week I start over.

At first I was excited to see some real progress and changes happening, sometimes much faster than I expected. But after about a year and a half of consistent effort, a weird thing started happening - I began to lose track of who I actually was. If I was always pushing myself to be more optimistic and enthusiastic, what was my default personality like? If I was becoming more thoughtful and forgiving in how I responded to conflict with other people, how would I know when I was genuinely upset? I suddenly didn't have clear answers to these things.

(This may sound familiar if you read the post for Traversing Illusory Sequences, and my feelings at the time were very similar for both pieces.)

So the imagery in Epistemic Machinations reflects this tension I was feeling and my struggle to understand which parts of me were authentic and which parts were an artificial construct, represented here by nature and machine.

It's interesting to reflect on this with hindsight because there are areas of my life where this is still very true. In particular, the relationship with the person who inspired Tension and Reverie forced me to reckon with a variety of conflicted thoughts and feelings, and I often struggled to find an authentic response to the challenges of that connection.

So even a couple years later I still relate to the feeling of tension around my efforts to be better in life while holding onto a core personality that I can identify as my "true" self.

Along those lines, I've talked in recent posts about how I believe machinery and wires in my art represent overthinking, stress, and anxiety, while elements of nature reflect a calmness, openness, and general ease in my thoughts and behaviors. I would even describe the latter as a sort of spiritual peace. Significantly, Epistemic Machinations was the first piece of art I made since 2021 to have bits of nature in it like trees, mountains, etc.

Everything prior to this was made under the shadow of intense anxiety and dread around the situation with my mouth and jaws, and although things certainly weren't perfect at the time I made Epistemic Machinations, I had begun to believe there was a new and better life ahead of me, and that was reflected in the sense of open wilderness.

That deeper sense of well-being, as well as the role of nature in my artwork, would ramp up and become even clearer in the subsequent art for Ascension.

The Process for Epistemic Machinations

As was often the case with art I was making around this time, I didn't have a clear idea of what I was trying to express when I started the drawing. I just had a particular feeling and a general image of the main figure in mind, and I allowed my emotions to guide the details.

I've talked in previous posts about the ink work and flat colors, so I'll mostly focus on the color rendering here. Incidentally, although I did the drawing for this one before Ascension and The Tireless Lament of Past Selves, I actually finished color work for it after both of those, and I think it shows. In particular, I feel I had a much better sense of how to create atmospheric perspective and lighting, and I was able to take a step into more saturated colors.

When I look back at the early art I was making in this style, for example Pillars of Affliction or Invocation of the Seraph, those images feel slightly desaturated without a lot of heavy shadows. Somehow I just didn't have the ability to push a heavy contrast with richer colors. I've continually worked at that (most recently with Moments After the End, which I think represents an even bigger step forward), but I definitely felt a shift on this one.

As always, I did all the color work in Photoshop. Once I had the palette worked out, I created a gradient for each object with the lighter side of the gradient pointing toward the light source (the sun). Next, I applied a slightly rough texture to each object by using the dodge and burn tools set to a textured brush and brushing over the object in circular motions.

Next step was to lasso out the areas of each object that I wanted to be in shadow and use the hue/saturation adjustment tool to drop the lightness and shift the hue slightly toward a cooler color (blue/purple.)

I followed a similar process with the edge highlights, lassoing out specific areas of each object and then filling the selection with a bright, pale yellow color. I also adjusted the opacity of the highlights in different areas to feel more or less intense relative to that area's exposure to the sun.

The final work was to create the lighting effects and atmospheric perspective, which on this one required a particular amount of effort since it's a daytime scene with such a strong light source.

Specifically, I lightened the actual line work around the mountains, clouds, and top edges of the figure to feel like they're receding into the distance. The lines for the sun and clouds are a light, warm color, very different from the black ink of the original drawing. I also added bright glows to the sky and the surface of some objects using a soft airbrush, once again set to a light, warm color.

The two images above show the comparison of the adjusted line color and rendering in the final art to the original black lines and flat colors.

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That's all for this one, thanks as always for reading. If you'd like to see more and support my art in the process, follow me on Instagram and consider subscribing here for email notifications on new blog posts. Cheers.