This Week’s Illustration Friday theme: Buzz
This was a 14″ X 17″ pencil sketch noodled on soon-shredded paper. I inked the drawing on bristol with a brush pen . I scanned and assembled it in Photoshop. Added a layer of textured ground and painted it using a textured brush named “Splatter.” It’s the first time I’ve used such a Photoshop brush, (I was recently inspired by a John K post on Art Lozzi’s Flintstones backgrounds, to try some more random, splotchy brushwork,) and I found it pleasing, but I need to work on it.

I’d love to hear what you think and what I could do to improve this type of illustration.

What’s This About?

This one is about work. Throughout the day, as a worker bee sits in his worn office chair that squeaks when his leg bounces, driving his neighbor, a forty-something year-old corporate veteran, into quick fits of rage soon quelled by the conditioning of proper organizational citizenship behavior, he sees yellow. It’s in the brown cube walls, the warm gray cinder blocks of the walls and the tops of the desks. All paper is yellow. His teeth … yellower.

The veteran’s sticky note, the one that she stuck to his monitor when he was getting more coffee, the one that reads “Pls stop squeaking. Thks!” is, well, you know. It, too, is yellow.

In the honeycomb of these office cubicles, yellow is just a nice way of being brown. That’s not the brown that nicely compliments a cool color with subtle shades. It’s the Brown that makes you forget the cool, the warm and everything else. This Brown makes the most of its allotted seven-point-seven-five hours, pushing the other colors into its puddles like a bully and convincing you that it’s the only color left.

After a few years, Brown conditions the worker bees to accept the following tenets:

• I will say “sounds good” even when it doesn’t make sense.
• I will focus on being present in my cube at 8:30 AM and 5:00 PM. From 10 AM to 2 PM, all bets are off.
• A contrary opinion is negative buzz, so I will agree with the Queen unquestioningly and do as I’m ordered.

What the bees need is a nice gust of wind, a bear, something other than a brown bear, preferably, or a nice plump bird landing on the branch to shake up the beehive and get the bees all riled up. No, a new, colorful poster for the walls is not the answer as it would soon turn yellow. Sixty-day notices might be a good start.