Here goes the 2nd step of the design of this web site. For the footer, I painted these collection of leaves inspired by a series of lucid dreams that I had many years ago. I dreamt I was in a garden where all the flowers and plants were made of energies and pure light. I can swear this is one of the most beautiful and breathtaking things I have seen in my life. They would glow in different colors and looking at them created a mesmerizing feeling in me. These recurrent dreams had a big impact on me. For a long time I have wondered about how to put this experience into images and music and it really changed my scope about the perception of the art and nature in life.

In a former post, I wrote about how I used some ivy leaves that I picked this winter during my walks. Other leaves were inspired by a picture of Alice In Wonderland’s ride in Disneyland that has been in my mind since I was a kid. I haven’t had the privilege of visiting Disneyland, but when I was a kid I used to read a book about it over and over. I still keep it at home. The picture in the book shows some beautiful leaves which I believe were based upon Mary Blair’s designs for the film.

In the next step I will talk about doing a font based upon my own calligraphy to use it on the web site.

As promised, here is an image of the first stage of the design for this web site. It doesn’t include the top header and menu yet and the illustrations for the footer are still missing, so what you can see so far is the background design and content.

When I first thought of doing the design for my own web site I decided to be the most honest I could. It’s something that happens naturally when Naomi and I work in design for other people, but when it’s about yourself is easy to get tempted to try look like someone cooler or better than what you think you are. My idea about this design is: “What you see is what you get”. So I’ve tried to create the atmosphere that really has to do with my art and persona.

For instance, for this web site, I have tried to create a feeling of the woodlands. All of the images and illustrations are on top of a background of black Conte drawing paper, since most of the illustrations are in (digital) Conte drawing. The image of the background is a scanning from a real paper that I did. The trees are intended to look like black ink on Conte paper. For these I was inspired by Eastern art and also some beautiful ink drawings that Roger Dean did in the early 70’s for the booklet of Yes album “Yessongs”. I’ve been trying to get the same feeling of half-hidden dark on dark drawing that you can only notice depending on the angle you look at it. Depending on the kind of screen that your computer has this effect may be more noticeable.

For the headings of the articles I tried several things but finally I decided to use this paper thing with Conte highlights and a classical mailing rubber stamp for the date of the posts.

The background of the content is this repeating image of long trees. My original idea was to draw branches, but it was not very practical in order to get the images repeating in the right way, so I decided to leave this minimalistic long silhouettes of trees.

In my next post I will show more about the customized font that I have created for the site.