your 5 senses and … time

…also one apple a day keeps the doctor away.

Hello! it’s Lea again,

I hope you had a great week. If you don’t know me, it's nice to meet you! This is Sunday Spreads, my personal illustration challenge. This week I had a bit of an existential crisis on how I perceive the world, actually no let me rephrase that I realized an important metric that we use every day in our daily lives to understand the world.

Here is the final illustration, and you can read more about the process below:

In my work, there is an important aspect that I want to portray as best as I can. I want it to feel sensorial as if the characters in my work are using their 5 senses to explore and understand their world.

These details make me feel like the world I’m creating around my character is real, just like my world as I’m exploring it with my 5 senses as well.

And this sensory experience in art is not new! The best example is a beautiful piece of medieval art from the 1500s : the Lady and the Unicorn.

It’s displayed in one of my favorite museum in Paris: The Musée de Cluny: Museum of the Middle Ages.

( and yes, it’s also the wallpaper of the Gryffindor common room in the Harry Potter movies)

The five tapestries above are Taste, Touch, Sight, Smell and Hearing.

So then what is the sixth tapestry below?

It still holds a lot of mystery, but there is a clue in the text above them on the tent which says: “ A mon seul Désir” which means to my only desire. It suggests that maybe Love is the last sixth sense that unifies all the others. And as senses help you understand your world, Love guides your understanding. ( and hate makes you reject things that you don't understand)

But there is another sense that is essential to us, which is Time. Or more importantly, what time means to you. Time is not just your routine, the numbers on your watch/phone that tell you when to get up, or go to work. It's also more subtle. It's a unit or measure. For example: when looking closely at branches of a tree past the spring Equinox, you have a sense of how long the tree will take to be fully in bloom and green before summer. The old stones tinted with moss give you a sense of the time that has passed since this building fell apart. Or when biting into a fruit, depending on the taste and the bitterness, you know how much time you should've waited for the fruit to be sweet.

This is what inspired the illustration I did this weekend, Time relative to an apple being eaten.

Here are the rough ideas on printer paper at work:

And a rough sketch on better paper at home. I wanted to push myself and try traditional this time, so I took out my light table for the very first time and tried to layer my final illustration with the rough draft underneath.

I also did a quick digital sketch to test colors:

and here was the illustration, straight from the scanner. It took me around 2 hours, roughly 1 or 2 episodes of Doctor Who.

And here was the final Illustration after some digital touches and recomposing.

I tried to add text, but I'm still considering what to write. I also like it as a silent piece :)

Anyways, let me know what you think, and don’t hesitate to reach out. I am always looking to connect with fellow artists & illustrators to share the joys and sorrows of creating pretty pictures from our heads.

Lea