Drawing Flies 52 Hornberg (this isn’t your daddy’s Hornberg). I know: When one envisions a Hornberg (I grew up not far from where it was created), once tends to see this lovely dry/wet fly with jungle cock cheeks and flowing, mallard-flank wings. A nostalgic fly from a nostalgic era, perhaps. With my current state of mind being what it is, I ended up about 180 degrees from there.

Notes: This is a fragmented, roughly drawn piece that borders on etching-style line application. I wanted the fly to feel unsettled, vibrating, perhaps even jarring in its demeanor. I also wanted the fly to be an opposite of what was likely expected, so realized that I would ultimately have to use the computer to achieve the right effect.

This was drawn using a rather chaotic and strong hand, then painted with slabs of watercolor. I used a longer. softer brush than usual to get the sloppy wash around the fly. I didn’t want precision and flow; I got the alternate textures that I was after.

Once done, I scanned the image into Photoshop, popped the saturation on the colors and then deepened the blacks. For the final result I wanted, I just hit Command+I to invert the image totally. That gave me carved, electric, vibrating neon all bent and scattered, with yellow-orange heat smoldering and wafting from the structure. It’s a Hornberg for sure, but it’s not the kind of Hornberg you’ll see in an old Weber tackle catalog.

I don’t expect that this DF52 drawing will garner the same appreciation as, say, the Sofa Pillow, but I don’t see this project as being about cookie-cutter drawings every week. Sometimes you have to go where you have no map and see what happens, even if the journey is just for yourself.

Tech info: Pencil, pen and watercolor on Pentalic paper. Scanned and then manipulated in Photoshop.

Jeff’s Hornberg is here. Interesting that he chose to go all-digital, I think. While Jeff did do a more traditional take on the pattern, he certainly didn’t go traditional with the media. Pretty cool to see how successful Jeff was with the complexity of the textures and patterns within our time limit. I especially like the Jungle Cock eye and sense of “depth-of-field” dimensionality on the hackle.