The Process: Madelyn Hernandez, Artist & Illustrator
The Process takes you into the creative minds of up-and-coming artists and asks them one simple question: what’s your process? Our third artist is Madelyn Hernandez, artist & illustrator, who defies odds with her beautiful, unconventional Faeries.
What’s your Process?
“When it comes to creating art, my process starts in a dirty room. Before welcoming another flow of creativity, I personally have something to overcome constantly and that is the pit of despair where I reside before I ever pick up a pencil. I reflect on the wisdom and experience I’ve gained as someone living with various flavors of mental health setbacks, so that now at the ripe age of 26 I know my bipolar disorder has to be dealt with before I am capable of new bodies of work. My process starts with acknowledging bipolar depression has made me forget I am an artist.
The sketching begins in an unmade bed with a dragon’s hoard of clean laundry wrestling in untidy sheets. I don’t need to give more graphic details — the room is dirty. It’s just plain messy. And it needs to be cleaned before any creative spirit is to be achieved. The almost random desire to sketch moves me to clean my room. I clean myself. I clean up my act and sit at my desk. My brain says it has to be done this way: in a BAM or I am to operate at a low frequency for another few days or weeks which obviously and logically cannot leave me open to receive inspiration.
Inspiration is always there, you just have to push yourself to meet it. When I learned that, art blocks or “lack of inspiration” revealed themselves to me as excuses. So, I go to my collection of artbooks, full of inspiration, wisdom, and views into the technical process of other artists much more experienced than me. Instagram and pinterest are also great for inspiration, as long as I don’t scroll longer than I plan to draw. The social aspect of Instagram can be distracting, but Pinterest is great for this, it’s a valuable resource for artists to organize images that inspire them. I find it very helpful to also make a point of looking at inspiration that isn’t artwork itself. I make it a priority to look at things unrelated to art because life itself is what inspires fresh artwork. Being out in nature is a quick hack to be inspired, in my personal opinion. I always leave my walks outdoors full of ideas. The sun or moon light on my face is received like a blessing pushing me to create. Being outside is recharging and effective when I need pushing out of a slump.
Back to the desk. Scribbling is essential to my warm ups and work. I warm myself up by quickly putting down lines and shapes. It’s a very intuitive process, creating faces or gestures after the page has been stricken by scribbles. I don’t put any pressure on myself by planning to share the warm up doodles — unless they’re like, really good.
When I go to draw a Faerie creature or human being, I first think about the emotion of the subject and what medium would be the most sensitive to the intent of the piece. This is not on principle, but I tend to keep most of my Faerie work traditional, done with pencil, ink, or watercolor and colored pencils. It is rare for me to stick a Faerie behind the screen of a device, it doesn’t feel right to me. I find my digital work more suited for character art and human beings. Faeries in a natural medium and Humans in a digital one, an intuitive decision.
A lot of my Faerie work is done on sketchbook paper. I am not loyal to any particular brands, just whatever I have and whatever works. I currently have four major sketchbooks I’m working in. Two are large and two are small. Two are for dry mediums and two are for mixed/wet mediums. One dry media sketchbook was a gift and the other was from a $2 two pack I bought at Ross, the discount department store. I got into the habit of using the mix media Canson sketchbooks in art school, not because I’m particularly devoted to the quality of paper, it’s more like muscle memory or a habit. When I’m in an art store, I pick up a Canson sketchbook.
For larger drawings or commissioned work, I use Canson or Strathmore watercolor pads or bristle board. I cut the paper into the desired size and tape them to a drawing board (which is normally a glorified sheet of firm cardboard). I visualize the composition or placement of the subject on the blank sheet and create a few different thumbnail sketches to send to the client as options. The thumbnails are rough with as few lines as possible and mostly a suggestion of how the final piece will be composed. In the illustration industry, these thumbnail options are called Comps. For my personal work, the subjects are placed where they land with very little planning occurring. I resort back to scribbling, like in my warmups. I scribble until a life is formed with the mess of lines. Years of life drawing and studying anatomy helps me to make sense of the scribbled lines and that’s when the creation happens.
At this point, drawing turns into sculpting. I think about where the lines need to go or what directions they need to be placed in to create the illusion of volume on this 2dimensional surface. I round out bellies and soft areas by moving lines and hatches around the presumptive soft surfaces of these creatures. No matter what pose the character is in, I’m thinking about it in 3dimensional space. Even if they are in a quarter view, the structure of the face and body would make sense if the character decided to get up, flip their hair, or fly away. This way of thinking helps me to avoid drawing features that are floaty or ungrounded to the subject. I suppose this thinking process is a result of my animation education at the Atlanta campus for the Savannah College of Art and Design. Though I have not touched any animation software in quite a while, my illustrative work leaves me with an itch that only my animation education can scratch. When people look at my Faeries or characters, I want them to feel a sense of life, movement, and spirit. I have a deeply rooted desire to animate again, but for now the life of my work comes from the sensitivity of the expressions and poses.
If the drawing calls for color, watercolor paint is my immediate choice. My journey in watercolor began only after attending a SCAD event and visit from Dinotopia author and artist James Gurney, who has become one of my greatest influences. I was hooked on to watercolor the day my dearest friend and I attended his talk and painting demo. Immediately after his visit, I bought my first pocket size pallet that I continue to refill and use to this day.
I splash my Faeries in color almost in a haste to get that lively liquid feeling. The color I run out of the most often is brown. It is intuitive of me to create characters of color, but I also make it a priority to portray them as diverse as the world we live in. I often get the question, “Why don’t you draw more white Faeries?” and my answer is a direction: Google Faeries or fantasy art and you will find the white characters you so desperately crave. There is an abundance. I am certainly not creating a shortage of white fantasy characters. I am Mexican. I am Dominican. It can’t be outlandish for me to create characters that reflect my Brown and Black friends and family. The questions I have received about race and my work is like swatting away flies at this point, I delete those comments now after years of engaging and arguing with people committed to find a problem where there is none.
It can take a few layers of watercolor to get the values and saturation I desire since the medium itself is known for its transparency. I am assisted by colored pencils or gouache to achieve a color or sense of texture watercolor can lack in. I tend to stylize my shading with a blue pigment in most of my work. After I accent the darkest values with blue, my painting is completed with a reinforcement of the linework in areas I want to stand out. This is normally done in ink with a brush pen or a micron for precision and detailing.
I tend to neglect my digital work unless fanart or a commission calls for it. However, when my Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is flaring in symptoms, I can find sitting at a desk easel and drawing and painting to be very very painful and unachievable. This is when digital art becomes my savior. Drawing on my Ipad in Procreate is a lot easier for me. If a sketch isn’t working, I can resize or distort it instead of having to use my limited energy to redraw it. Over the sketch, I create a layer for more polished linework. I create a third layer to paint under the lines. I select my colors with a neutral background, as painting on white can make me select colors absent of color theory. If the colors I select are off, I can change the hue, value, or saturation without having to start over. I work in as few layers as possible to not confuse myself (and honestly because my aging Ipad is running out of space). Digital thumbnails have also been effective in planning my colors for traditional paintings!
I have small watercolor pallets for the sake of portability and the compact size of my Ipad is also very useful to me. It’s most comfortable for me to work small. Due to my MS, I haven’t had much of a conscious choice in the size decisions of my work. I have a weak grip and chronic pain that I only learned to stop complaining about on a daily basis in my late twenties. As long as I can create art, and get the images and feelings out of my head, I’m happy with the small canvases.
A lot of my process that I have described happens in hypomanic moods. Bipolar depression is a constant cloud looming over me as much as I try to avoid it. When it pours, my art supplies gather dust. My room gets messy. It becomes hard enough to smile, let alone make any art. But even when interpersonal relationships or responsibilities suffer and fade, my love of art remains after the storms of depression. My Faeries are resilient in their need to be seen. I gather the strength to draw them and give them life with my own resilience.”
View more of Madelyn’s work here: https://www.instagram.com/lyndezart/
