Where You Find Me Now: Hidden Pictures, Puzzles & Life Paths
Welcome back, Friends. Today we talk about the things that are hidden and the things we find.... and of course, ART! As human beings, we like a good puzzle, but we just LOVE a great puzzle. Don't we? Ever wonder why that is so? We are, in some way, predisposed to loving puzzles, quizzes, and the like. It is as if we were pre-programmed to be natural problem-solvers. We just can't leave it alone. We MUST solve the puzzle!
As humans, we are drawn to solving puzzles due to an existential need to impose order on chaos, rooted in evolutionary biology, psychology, and neuroscience. Puzzles offer a safe, controlled way to simulate life’s survival challenges, triggering dopamine rewards, enhancing pattern recognition, and facilitating a calming state that satisfies our biological imperative to find meaning, purpose, and mastery over our environment. When we solve a puzzle or a problem, it releases dopamine, which sort of "addicts" us to solving puzzles, but in a positive way. Our brains evolved into being "problem-solvers" because we needed to navigate things like how to avoid threats, finding food, and create shelter. Puzzles provide a structured, achievable challenge that brings a sense of accomplishment. They help us to feel more productive in life. They stimulate both sides of the brain, engaging our capacities in both logic and creativity. They help reduce stress by immersion into a "mental escape" from daily worries.
Puzzles allow us to exercise these critical thinking skills in a low-stakes environment.
There are SO MANY kinds of puzzles; an almost endless variety. Today, however, we are focusing on Hidden Picture Puzzles. Have you ever been getting ready to go somewhere and you are making your mental checklist of all the things you need to take with you on your "Journey" and you discover... your keys are missing? Have you ever intended to watch a movie or TV show and have done all your ready-work: dressed in some comfy clothes, gathered your snacks, sat down on the couch, and you're just about to... the remote control is missing? These minor inconveniences in life can often trigger anger or annoyance. But maybe we should look at these moments as if they were a game, a puzzle we now get to solve. Like Mary Poppins says, "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down."
What about when we get lost? When it is we who are hidden. When we are lost physically in a location, there are things we can definitely do to either help ourselves find our way back to safety: retracing our steps, marking our path, following water downstream, or using natural indicators like the Sun to define direction. When we are lost mentally, we often pause and acknowledge it. We stop. Breathe. Admit to ourselves that we need to find clarity and direction. We can often reflect on our values. We take small steps. We reframe the situation and cultivate positivity to find our way back to ourselves. What do we do when we are lost in life? When we feel like we've strayed too far off our life paths? At this point, it is best to be your own compass. Reflect and realign (easier said than done). Seek guidance to help you find clarity. Set new goals to help you get back on your track. Start taking small actions toward those new goals each day until the fog clears and you are once again found. What was once hidden is again revealed to us.
Engaging in games and puzzles often helps us sharpen these skills. There's a reason people still look for Waldo and don't give up until they find him. There's a reason it continues to be as popular as it is. It is an underlying existential need to succeed in finding the things that are lost and hidden from us. I feel that we can't really discuss Hidden Picture Puzzles without first discussing why we care so much about them. Humans have cared about puzzles for centuries. I think it's important to understand why first.
Several years ago, I felt very lost, myself, in my life path. I was going through some things personally, and it threw me off. I wasn't exactly sure what to do with myself. Creating this (well, starting to create it) Hidden Picture Puzzle Illustration was just 1 of several that pushed me back onto my own life path. So, finally completing this illustration and getting the opportunity to not only share it, but to also discuss why I care so much about it, means a great deal to me, as an artist and as a human.
There are many kinds of Hidden Picture Puzzles. To list a few...
Classic Hidden Pictures: Often black-and-white scenes (sometimes full-color) where objects are cleverly disguised within the lines of a larger, themed drawing.
Photo Puzzles: Instead of illustrations, these use real-life photos to hide items, increasing the difficulty.
Inverted/Secret Puzzles: Use specialized printing techniques where colors are inverted or require a red lens/filter to reveal the hidden images.
Optical Illusion Paintings: At first glance, you think you see everything within a painting/illustration, but upon further inspection, there is something you might have missed entirely..
Picture Mazes: Combines the need to find a path through a maze while also locating hidden objects along the way.
Spot-the-Changes (Differences): While slightly different from "hidden object," this type is often categorized together, where players find 5–10 differences between two nearly identical, complex pictures. "One of these things is not like the other..."
People are most familiar with Where's Waldo and Highlights Magazine Hidden Pictures. My illustration falls under the category of Classic Hidden Pictures. As I mentioned before, I started this project many many many moons ago. I will not say how long exactly out of the sake of not embarrassing myself... "They spent THAT long working on it?!!!!" But, yes. I spent many years off and on working on this project. I would often pull it out, work on it for a while, get frustrated with it, then shelve it again for a long time before pulling it back out again. I finally decided that it was time to take it to finish and see how it would turn out.
So... Let's talk about it, the Art. Shall we?
I also needed to do research into the hidden object illustrations themselves. I needed to know things like: How many objects are normally hidden in one of these illustrations? What sort of objects are the ones that are commonly hidden? How are these objects often hidden? I went to Highlights magazine for these answers. I then was able to make MY list of all the objects that I wanted to hide in my illustration based on my research. I also made notes on how these objects were commonly drawn in these hidden pictures.
My next step was to design my lunchroom and start to figure out my illustration's composition. I had looked at many many different images of middle school lunchrooms. I had decided that there would be a row of tables starting from the foreground and receding towards the back, and I wanted it to be the "last row" of tables, so to speak. I wanted there to be a side aisle next to the tables so that we could also see students walking, congregating, and taking their trays back to the tray drop off. I also wanted to see the wall because I wanted to use the pillars to place posters on, as well as hide objects within them. They also play a role in providing context for the perspective of the illustration. I had also originally planned to have the tray drop-off in the very back, but decided to have it more off-frame because gathering students around it would have made a visual distraction as well as eye-sore and sort of mess up the flow of my composition.
So I had pre-decided the breakdown of how this sketch/final drawing was going to go before I even began it: I would design the lunchroom utilizing traditional perspective guidelines, I would draw the lunchroom and main elements first, then add in my main characters and crowd as I went along. Utilizing the skills I refreshed in my self-imposed perspective crash-course refresher, I began to build my illustration the long and old-fashioned way with traditional perspective. I was able to set up exactly where everything in this lunchroom was going to be and sketch in the main elements. I knew that due to the process that I chose, I would need to both sketch and draw at the same time, sort of finalizing the sketch as I drew it in. I found the perfect angle for my lunchroom setting using my eye-viewer (old-fashioned methods), really focusing on composition. And then I continued to draw/sketch in more lunchroom elements to make it actually look like a lunchroom.
After my lunchroom was more or less finalized and drawn, I could start designing all the characters that would populate my Hidden Picture Illustration. I didn't exactly have a plan as to who should be in the foreground or background. I had decided that I would keep this part of the process kinda loose. I would just do characters of the kids I pulled image reference for and see who/what turns out. I can then look at all the character designs and decide, "OK, these characters seem to jump out and are a bit 'stronger' in nature than these other ones." I could then decide who is going to be the main character and who will end up being placed in the crowd. I also needed characters that were sitting and characters that were standing, and characters that were walking... crowd scenes require ALOT of planning ahead of time.
After I had all the characters I thought I needed, I scanned them all into my computer along with the final sketch of the lunchroom. Now there is a traditional-media way of doing this part of the process with many different layers of tracing paper, but I knew I needed to save the tissue paper layers for hiding my objects... You can only have so many tracing paper layers over a sketch before it gets too "cloudy" and you can't see through the layers to what is below. SO I had all my characters individually scanned. I could start playing around with where each character was going to be placed within the composition. Some characters needed to be placed in sets as they were drawn as a group (for example, the group of girls talking to each other in the background on the left-hand side, or the group of students that are talking to each other at a table to the right, etc). I placed in my main characters first. I knew I wanted a triad with the 2 young girls on their phones talking to each other from opposite sides of the illustration, and then completing that triangular composition with the young boy who is saying something to them. Maybe he's asking to sit down. Maybe he is wondering what on their phones is so funny. Maybe he's introducing himself. We aren't sure, and that really isn't the point. He is interacting with the other two main characters, and that's what matters. With them placed within the composition, I could then move on to placing the crowd in behind them. This was a little tricky, and I'm glad I went digital with this part of the process because it's more forgivable. I can change my mind an infinite number of times if necessary. Come back and make changes later if I want, if I decide I don't like my previous placements.
Once everyone was in their place, I had a few nice prints made (to scale) so that I could return to my drafting table and, using the layered tracing paper method, I began to hide all the objects within the illustration. This was actually a very fun part of the process. I got to be very playful and sometimes clever with my hiding of them. I also used this step to fill in what was going to go on the posters and pendants in the background.
When all the objects were hidden and other details filled in, I was ready to pre-ink this illustration. I say pre-ink because this inked version of the illustration would only be used for one purpose. It was going to be used for my Color Composition Sketch. After I inked the illustration, I scanned it in and began to figure out what was what. I knew this was going to be a black and white illustration, but I wanted to use a small scale of greys in the illustration, also. I knew going all the way to true black would make it difficult to see some of the hidden objects, so I utilized just a really dark grey instead. After some deliberation, I was able to make some final choices on the Color-Comp (as illustrators call them). Once I had a finished color comp, I again had a few nice prints made to scale. It was finally time to move on to the Final Illustration Stage.
In the beginning, I had made the decision that I would try to final versions of this illustration and then pick the better of the two to go with. I had wanted to do the final illustration in my normal digital collage style that combines both traditional and digital media. I had also wanted to do a version that was ink and ink-wash, similar to my Norman illustration I had completed a few years previously. I began with the ink and ink wash illustration first. I figured if that didn't work out, I had my backup plan already ready to go.
I approached the ink and ink wash illustration final the same way that I approached my Norman Illustration. I'm not exactly sure where it went wrong, exactly. But this version of the illustration did not turn out well. I think a few things riddled it into total disaster: 1.) I don't think I had enough ink-wash layers on the piece before trying to add ink contour linework to it. In the end, the darks were just not dark enough, and the whole image was too light. Ink wash requires countless layers of adding ink wash to it to get this wonderful range of lights to darks. The process would be similar for working with watercolors. So I think that was the first reason this didn't work out. 2.) There were too many smaller details in the far background to be able to put on this size illustration piece. Even with my spector-specs (magnifying art goggles), I would not have been able to ink the finest of lines for the smallest of background details that this illustration really needed in order to be successful in fulfilling my vision. My "workaround" for this was to do ink wash and ink of those background characters larger (where I could see and ink them by hand) and then digitally composite them in the BG and shrink them in the computer. However, this brings about its own problems of matching the ink wash tones to where they would look like it belongs there. 3.) Overall, after I had worked on it for several weeks, it just didn't look polished enough to be considered a "finished" and "professional" illustration. It also was taking SO LONG on an illustration that had ALREADY taken SO LONG.... So, with a very heavy and almost defeated heart, I chucked that version out, and we started over with my Plan B.
Plan B. was to finish the illustration the same way that I finish many of my illustrations now, with a hybrid of traditional and digital media. (I promise the process blog is coming soon... promise) I would bring this to finish in digital collage... but in black and white digital collage. Ultimately, this was much more successful because I could ink those small character details at a much larger scale outside the computer, scan them in, and resize them to their smaller size required by my preliminary sketches. This method also opens up the door for me to bring in a tactility of a variety of textures to add to the interest of the final illustration. It was simpler to match my collage "swatches" to the Color-Comp Sketch and then place them in the final illustration. This method was also more fun to work on. It felt very comfortable and much less arduous, laborious, and torturous that the ink and ink wash had turned out to be. Not to mention, this process moved along much quicker. The illustration was completed within a week after I started it. I am very, very, very pleased with the outcome of this illustration.
After finishing the final illustration, I needed to put together the "Find These Objects" page to accompany it. Most of the time, in other hidden pictures, they "lift" the object "as is" directly out of the illustration, however it is colored and place it in the "find Me" area that way. I did sort of do that. I did lift the linework part of each object from the actual illustration (digitally, of course), but I wanted to rotate them all right side up and make them all relatively the same size in proportion to each other on the page. I didn't want to give them the local color that they were in the illustration, as I felt that made it too easy to find them that way. I wanted sort of this grey wash-toned under palette to prepare them on top of then have the line work, and then place a bit of white underneath the line work to make the objects stand out. I then adjusted them visually on the page so that they felt balanced. I then added the object labels. I branded it, of course, with my logo and set the challenge to any viewer looking for a fun way to spend a few... well... however long it takes them to solve the puzzle.
This pretty much sums up the process of working on this illustration. It has been a very long road with it. I, honestly, could not be more proud of it (maybe because it did take so long to complete). I gave myself a large pat on the back for coming full circle with this piece that I had started so long ago. I could have dropped it and given up on it at any time, but I was so determined that I really, really wanted to see it come to fruition. I stuck with it, and I feel very accomplished in that regard. This is probably going to be one of those pieces that will always be a favorite of mine.
Now, reader/viewer, I invite you to take a closer look at this illustration. Can you Find Them All? Do you see? I hope you can and do... and that you have fun while doing it. After finding all my hidden objects, I hope you take some time to find out where you are. Where can you be found right now? Are you where you want to be? Are you hidden? Are you lost? Can you find your way back to yourself? Can you find the path again?
You may be wondering the counter to that question: Where am I, now? Where can you find me? Where do I find myself? Am I still lost? I can't say whether or not I am back on the right path. If feels like I am, and, for me, that's good enough. And as far as where you can find me: well, I am not as mysterious as Waldo. These days, I can be found in a few different places here in the city. Firstly, my Art Desks are where you might find me at some point every single day. I make sure I am always working on some sort of Art project at any given time. You can find me at the movie houses. I LOVE a good movie, and I love seeing them at the cinema as much as seeing them at home. You can find me on my couch, cuddling with my kitties. You can find me at a park on warm days. You can find me at the ice skating rink on cold days. You can often find me aimlessly wandering about in museums. You may even find me hiding out in a good theater...
...and, of course, you can always find me here.
All my love to you, friends, wherever you are in your lives.
I hope you're finding happiness. Stay found out there.
until next time,
Keep dreaming, keep sketching, keep thinking, keep laughing, and most important of all, keep making art.
Comments
Post a Comment