Under the Old DNA Tree

These were a series of drawings I made for my brother back in 2007 titled "Under the Old DNA Tree". The premise was nothing more than creating a fictional landscape revolving around a wise old tree. Why a DNA tree? The allusion could be to that of the biblical Tree of Life, being in the center of the garden and all things new being created around it, or the tree can be symbolic of God Himself in the form of a tree, bringing strange new life to the land around Him. Whatever your interpretation, it is meant to appear almost as though it came from a dream... whether nice dream or nightmare I suppose is up to the viewer.

Or maybe it doesn't come off as dreamy, maybe it's just weird... if there's one thing I learned in my 5 years at UMass, it's that NOBODY will interpret your artwork the way you intended... I mean nobody. You draw a tree, they see a cow, you draw a donkey, they see a democrat. Or maybe art just wasn't my calling.
The interesting thing about this piece is that all the animals were just sketches that had been floating around in my notebook for about 3 years, all I did was scan them and color them. So I guess you can say I whipped them together last minute, or that I spent three years working on these pictures... I prefer the latter.

This was the first time I really utilized my wacom tablet as well. I typically just scan and color in Illustrator/Photoshop using the fill tool and the select tool. This time, however, I scanned and used the wacom to give it a more sketched out feel, focusing on more detail than simple shadows and solids. I was pleased with the end result.

Live from the DNA tree,
~ Mark