# @stevedmcdonald on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DV9Z7V-AbsB
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/63359070-stevedmcdonald-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/8cf8069d8b.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-03-16T20:54:12.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Steve McDonald 🎨📚 (@stevedmcdonald) — https://gondola.cc/stevedmcdonald

## Caption

'The All-Kinds Store'

I have been drawn lately to places like these, roadside shops that seem less built than gathered. They feel assembled from repairs, additions, salvaged boards, remembered corners, photographs, and half-lost ideas about what a building ought to be. That is close to how I have been working. I have been bringing more collage into the process, more photography, more architectural modeling, and the result is something I love: the image moves closer to reality without fully agreeing to it. It becomes believable, but not obedient.

These stores are full of that same energy. They are “finds of all kinds” in every sense. They hold objects that have slipped loose from their original lives and been given a second chance: signs, tools, jars, chairs, wires, odd souvenirs, useful junk, beautiful junk, the things nobody set out looking for but were glad to discover. The buildings themselves feel found as well, patched together from weather, need, invention, and time. Warm light spills out across the road as if to say that whatever this place is, it is open, alive, and still in use.

That is the feeling I wanted here. Not fantasy exactly, and not documentation either. Something nearer to the experience of memory, where real structures, real light, and real surfaces are pulled slightly out of alignment and made more vivid by it. Photography gives the work its weight. Collage gives it its instability. The architectural models let it stand there like something you could almost drive past at dusk and swear you had seen before. These are roadside discoveries, built from fragments, held together by light, and made convincing by the fact that they never become entirely real.

#roadside #sdm #illustration #digitalillustration #hybridart #contemporaryillustration #digitalpainting #traditionaldrawing #customdiffusion #adobe #aiart #oldscoolartist #newschooltools

*My illustrations come to life through a hybrid process that blends hand drawing, custom diffusion models, SD rendering, Adobe Photoshop drawing and painting, Topaz filters and effects, custom texture overlays, and a deep archive of traditional artwork and photography used to train my models.

## Stats

- **Views:** 0
- **Likes:** 9,211
- **Shares:** 0
- **Comments:** 57

## Tags

traditionaldrawing, sdm, illustration, newschooltools, roadside, digitalpainting, oldscoolartist, hybridart, digitalillustration, customdiffusion, aiart, contemporaryillustration, adobe

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