Need a holiday season gift idea?
I have some of my extracts available for $100 each. They're acrylics on Rives BFK paper, 8" X 10". They're available at http://www.brucejensen.com/art/extracts.html and payment is processed through paypal. Click through the thumbnails, maybe you'll find something you like!
I'm happy to report that my second attempt at painting this one came out better than the first.
Process note:
The color palette I've been using for the these has been Lascaux: oxide olive brown, oxide yellow, oxide red and ultramarine blue. I've switched the ultramarine out for a Liquitex pthalocyanine blue.
Actually I decided to start over, and repaint extract 13. It was overworked and getting muddy. Today, I'm skipping forward and posting extract 14 which I recently finished. I'll be working toward a better resolution for the missing 宇宙人.
Three heads are better than one ~ another acrylic painting from my alien menagerie extracts.
Most of my alien menagerie project exists as piles of pencil sketches. The time I have to work on oil paintings is less than I'd like, so they take quite a long time to complete. "Extracts" is the name I've given to a series of more casual paintings that I can complete with more speed and spontaneity.
The aliens in these pieces are pulled straight from my sketchbooks. I'm not worried about setting up an environment for these, or how they might fit into a more elaborate piece or series someday. I like to think of them as plates from a journal or guidebook of various 宇宙人。
They're acrylics on Rives BFK paper (7.5x10"). It was really fun to pick up acrylics again for these pieces. I used them for most of my career as an illustrator. There's a comfort of familiarity that I haven't acquired for oils just yet.
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
