Max gregors super blog

So I often get asked about my process and how I go about creating a new piece and I always say it varies from piece to piece. To demonstrate this I thought I would record my process every once and a while so I can show you lot how I do things........

This is by far one of my most popular piece's so i thought it would be a good place to start. This image actually started out as a doodle hence there not being much of a under drawing.

I always try and have a massive range of tone in my images. I tried to make the pattern on the butterflies as dark as possible to ad drama to the image also it makes the butterflies much more defined.

So there is always a point when you do a drawing like this (I.E without really much of a plan!) you have to decide whether or not the drawing is finished or if you build it into something more this was that point. I was having a lot of fun with I epically enjoyed doing the dress I'd been looking at a lot of Mucha's work recently and was really inspired by how he create amazing silhouettes and shapes with how he draws fabric and I would like to think I managed to catch a little bit of his vibe in this image.

So I cracked on the the whole Mucha vibe......

This was a classic example of think of an idea and then realizing its gonna be a nightmare I forget the name of this flower but you see it in a lot of tattoos... they took me ages to draw!!

So I think this is when the drawing really started to come into its own. The meaning of a piece of art can evolve wast the artist is working on it and I think that's what happened here. A friend of mine passed away earlier that year and I remember being greatly moved by this video I found on you tube of Werner Herzog Talking about the death of Klaus Klinski

You can watch it here....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLnDyVJzU38

It was the section at the end where he talks about how in death everything that ways on us goes away and we are free like butterflies. It really touched me and looking back I think that this a was always some where in the back of my head when I started this image. So I realized what I was depicting here was a metaphor for life. Ultimately as each moment passes we loose the things that weighs our self down from one moment to the next but we are all the some of each of those moments.

That's what I think the butterflies represent in this image is the passing of time the girl in away is both turning into butterflies and the butterflies are becoming here. I added the skulls to not only be a symbol of death to balance out the symbol of life in the flowers but also as a statement on how this is true for all living things.

Finally I wanted to add in something to convey a sense of complexity and diversity so the image given how it had ended up being about such a grand subject matter. Rather that do something super cheesey like added in a load of ethnic groups etc to the image I decided to let my tools do the work and created this pattern using lots of different pencil led weights. The way the shapes interlock for me touches on the codependent nature of life and how ultimately one thing is defined by everything else around it...

M