The Monkey Project

The Monkey Project was a comission for the May 2012 Night of Museums exhibition at the National Museum of Art (MNAR) in Bucharest. The idea was to take an element from one of the paintings in the museum and use it to create a new piece of art to be exhibited on the fence of the museum towards Bucharest's main street, Calea Victoriei.

 

 

I chose this mischievous monkey from a painting (can't remember the author or title) and decide to make a sort of comic-like story with the character using only black marker for a tool.
I started doing research at first, found the type of monkey in the painting - a Roloway monkey, the one with the white goatee - who is a little ugly to be honest (meaning I had to make him more human) and started to imagine him in all sorts of situations. So he had chains and he escaped, what would he do next? ...

 So I downloaded all the reference images I needed and printed them after I had written down some ideas of what he would do. I often find that the best ideas come to me in the dark, just by the lightof the computer or when lying down with my eyes closed - maybe it's about all that third eye activation or something..?

After about two A3 pages of pre-sketches to get the feel of the character I simply started drawing with a pencil looking at both the reference photo and the vision in my mind, and then added the marker. As I gained more confidence the pencil was droppped entirely and the drawings were made directly with the marker on paper.

After that came scanning the drawings at high-quality and arranging them in Photoshop to send to the museum for printing and dispaying.

I think the success of this project was due to a few things: having LOTS of practice from art school (the previous two weeks had been spent using a gestural drawing style after a live model), being properly advised to use just black marker as my line drawing was one of my best skills and just using my creativity as I never had before (simply because I was never given an illustration project such as this before).

The entire series has also been colored and appeared as a comic in the March 2017 issue of Romanian COMICS Magazine.

Each monkey is available for digital download in my Etsy shop.

Thank you for viewing,
Meruna.