I'm working on a couple new oil paintings for alien menagerie. Here's a small peek at one of them in progress. One that I come and go to as time allows.
Is September an odd time to be considering snowmen? This is "winter" in alien menagerie. Somewhere in the galaxy it's snowing right now.
oil on wood panel 19" x 20"
This is a quick sculpey maquette I made for my alien menagerie "spring" painting that I'm doing preparatory work on. I'm enjoying the change of seasons as we're finally feeling spring here in NYC. The backyard cherry tree is in full bloom and the koi are out of their winter stupor. I've pretty much settled on a color palette for the painting and getting ready to prep a panel for it as well.
I decided a while back that each alien in the alien menagerie/seasons would have 3 eyes. This is the only one though that it's not readily apparent on as they are distributed radially around it's head. Yes, this is the sort of thing I obsess about.
Initially I was stumped by what the setting and dynamic of the winter creature would be. I considered a hibernating character. Perhaps the scene would be in a burrow, or maybe the box could be a freezer. I wasn't happy with the idea of painting a sleeping character though. On the upside, I rather liked the idea that came out of this line of thought, that we'd be viewing the scene through a frosted pane of glass with the center wiped clear.
Eventually I started playing with the idea of a snowman. Simple, obvious, though not 'biological', it served as a fun point of departure and pretty quickly evolved into the character I'm painting for this series. My snowman became white and fluffy, so now I'm working the balance between cute and weird.
Snowball on a stick is pretty limited as reference goes. To prepare for the painting I'm working on I built a model, or maquette.
I'd pretty much figured out how I wanted the alien to appear in my "winter" painting. With pencil sketches and a digital color study finished, I decided to go a step further than usual. I wanted to explore the building of a maquette. It's not a step in previsualization that I have ever used before. I arrived at this decision inspired by Jim Gurney's book IMAGINATIVE REALISM. His examples of the benefits of maquettes are priceless. My alien has some pretty absurd, if simple 'anatomy'. From my model, I wanted to learn more about how the fur could look, how the light falls on it, and the flow of the coat. It seemed even more logical to build a model, as stop motion animation characters were among my inspirational influences for this painting. There's some Rankin/ Bass abominable snowman in this fellow.
It's been a fun preliminary process. I'm keeping the maquette nearby while working on the painting, and this model doesn't melt under the lights.
*on upload youtube suggested I tag the video as "pets" & "kitten" hmmmm
When is a painting finished?
Sometimes a piece is finished by the necessity of a deadline, which can actually be a very useful. Lacking that, the question becomes more open ended. I've worked on this piece at various times, off and on. I considered it close to finished and sat it aside for months. I worked on other things and eventually came back and gave it more attention. I finally feel comfortable with calling it finished.
For a long time alien menagerie was a stack of pencil sketches and notes. I worked on and accumulated them for years without moving forward with them as paintings. Commercial work always took precedence, but slowly I've been finding ways to make more time for these pieces. I designed this guy a few years ago, while participating in an online design forum. It was a way to push my sketches and ideas for alien menagerie into a more fully realized form by making a digital painting weekly. The moderator of the forum had a thing about plants not being eligible as a source for creature design, so I took that as something to challenge in and of itself! I was quite fond of the result and knew I'd come back to eventually.
When I'm organizing ideas, I tend to think in terms of a thematic series. Lots of lists live among my sketches. This creature fit nicely into a series of four pieces on the theme of seasons. 春夏秋冬。This is summer.
Spring would be the logical place to start, but I didn't.
Winter is in progress.
This won't be a daily blog. Writing for me is a long process of write, erase, and write again, so I'm not a terribly efficient or confident wordsmith. That being said, I hope this becomes a useful avenue where I can express some of the thinking behind the pictures I make, and perhaps give a little insight into just what the heck I'm doing.
Finishing summer seems like a good place to start. September is a good time for starting something new.
