Searching for Secrets

As part of my MAKE 2013 workshop, I led a project with all my participants for Light Grey Art Lab's Message in a Bottle show. It's a little show within a show--ours is called Searching For Secrets, and each person created a piece with a letter hidden inside. The pieces are arranged in order, so once you find the letter in each image, they spell out a message together! I couldn't be happier with all my participants' work, it's a great range of styles and subjects with plenty of mystery to go around (and letters hidden in different ways!) Take a look and figure out the message for yourself!

The theme I gave everyone was Searching for (or discovering!) a secret.
Here's mine, 'Relic'

Can you find my letter??

Part of the project was challenging everyone to use informal subdivision to help come up with sketches. I felt that the working method itself is appropriately secrets-themed--you're looking at a bunch of lines and trying to figure out an image hidden within them.
Here's my informal subdivision lines and the sketch I settled on:

 I actually had a million other sketches, but lost the file with all of them in it. D'oh!
I thought that something sci-fi themed would be fun to draw--I've been reading a lot of cyberpunk recently (Snowcrash, The Diamond Age, Neuromancer) and visions of dirty dystopian futures have been floating around in my mind.

I ended up moving the whole image down a bit for better compositional value, which means my final image doesn't line up with my informal subdivision quite as well. However, I think the main value of informal subdivision is to suggest composition and generate ideas. If you decide to work with informal subdivision and think that something doesn't look right, change it!

Thanks again to all my participants for their fantastic work! You guys did great.