This started out as a simple idea. The inktober prompt is Miniature and I figured as an illustration I’m looking through three different magnifying glasses at some tiny writing would encapsulate the idea. It an example of the type of Strange loop I like to include in my art. That was the inspiration Implementing it became a bit more complicated.
I tried out several compositions and they looked terrible. I’ve got a couple of big magnifying glasses and they’re circular So I needed superimposed circles which can make for an interesting composition, but the image inside circle needs to become more magnified at each step. So I thought I’d show this by including my hand or fingers holding the appropriate magnifying glass which of course needed to be smaller in a smaller space at each step. Two magnifying glasses where not a convincing composition. Three became very tight but I did have an old hand lens, which looked ok im the space available. So I spend a bit of time making a few drawings to get scales of my fingers and position of the magnifying glasses. I roughed out the basic composition but of course it’s not really possible to set up the same to sketch from life. After a couple of false starts in my sketchbook and also a lot of rubbing out I came to reasonable composition. But, then I ran into problems. I’m still having spacial problems with my vision close up and I found it very hard to do the detailed line work, particularly making things join up. What worked in the end was to begin with the innermost magnified image do all the ink line work within it and then move out to the next one.
It looks OK in the end but it’s not too obvious what I was trying to achieve. For those that are interested the text in the hand lens “This is tiny font used to get more words into a page of text within a computer file AI slop etc.” It’s hand written by me but it’s meant to be the type of hallucination LLM AI chatbots pump out. An you se the clue why?
The moral of this story is next Keep it much Simpler, don’t strain your eye.
