Subdued Orange

The color orange to me is... Well, it's a bold color, but the thing is, it's not expressive like the color red or something. Instead it's more... like mute passion, right? It's silent, but underneath it, is so much hidden, energy and feelings and ideas.

I've been doing a lot of photos, and my photos are probably better than my ugly little drawings, but I actually feel very close to my drawings (especially the originals, not the scanned thing you actually see here on your computer screen). Every line, every curve, was done by my pencil. The light shadings I drew softly, the bold lines I drew strongly... the curves of her eyelashes, I created them too, delicately. And to see her expression afterward, when I'm finished-- she won't speak, but inside her there is a lot of feelings going through her. And it's not a gentle quiet shyness either, but almost a bold silence that keeps her from speaking, and that's what I like about her.

The problem with drawings is that there are so many mistakes I can make, disproportioned faces, ugly hands, crooked noses, and whatnot. At least with photos, even if it's poorly focused and poorly exposed, no one can tell you "the shading on her face is all wrong." Not that I don't mind criticism (constructive criticism is always good! I appreciate it a lot) but it's frustrating that my sketches can never be perfect.

But even so, yes, I feel very close to what I draw...

This drawing goes along with these two one-color pictures: pink [link] and violet [link]

The title comes from... Well one day, I was eating an orange at my lunch table, and I was thinking about a story I was going to write later (an Icarus-like story, and I had just come up with the line "If you fly/Much to high/In the sky/You will die"). And my friend's mom, who works at the cafeteria wakes me from my daydream thoughts and says, "You look subdued." And I went home and looked up subdued in the dictionary. But anyway, that's where the title comes from.

An alternate title I was playing with is "In this era of falling flowers." I like that title too, but it has nothing to do with the color orange.

Haha, what a long description, I hope this picture is liked.