Wordplay

So my word is BUILD.

Sketches:

The planning stage of this project was really difficult for me. I wasn't crazy about the word I drew because every image it gave me was depressingly geometric, architectural, and stiff. I spent a lot of time experimenting with other words and halfheartedly putting together letter blocks. . . 

Luckily, I found an alternative image that really caught my eye. This pile of stones was a fountain, but I followed up my discovery by looking up a lot of cairns. Rocks just have a much more pleasing form that I got excited about. At first I was going to make a pile of rocks and have the word "build" show up in the shading. . . but this proved to look really weird when I tried it out.

So I switched over to spelling out the word "build" with the rocks of my cairn, but with a twist--the rock pile is upside-down as far as the word is concerned, defamiliarizing it and adding some visual interest to the piece. Instead, the cairn's shadow formed the actual word. Then I started shading. Remember that glowy mushroom tutorial? I've been putting it to practice a LOT.

I made the mistake of shading my cairn without the background visible, which gave it some incorrect shading. That has since been corrected. Also, I was a little nervous about how faint the word "build" was so I sharpened and darkened it a bit. . . 

I really like gradients. Have you noticed?