Saturday, March 23, 2013

Gnome Tree Apple

  This is an image I painted when looking after a gallery for my girlfriend. There were three days and it was open eight hours a day and I was there all three. I managed to complete this whole thing in that time.

  I tried the method I produced to do my Baba-Yaga series in university (which can be seen here amongst other illustrations) for the first time with reference to a photograph of a tree. This Bilibin style mixed with more realistic imagery was interesting. I hope to continue honing this technique in future paintings. (Maybe with ducks?)

  I didn't really have a focal point of the painting during the sketch phase so I made up this little big nose creature dude and put a red apple as a secondary focal point. (This focal point garbage is referring to image composition, usually done with placement of a person, face, strong color or strong pattern to create aesthetics.)
  I use that Bruegel red that I like so much. This is how I describe it because artsy-fartsy types might not know what Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is. It's basically a Wes Anderson red. He's very influential to me. You can see his influence on a lot of my university paintings.

  With this painting you can see Japan starting to seep into my color scheme. The saturation came way down except for the focal points. Look at this retailer. Try and find a strong color amongst their products. I dare you.

  The leaf pattern molding on the frame to the image was bought at the hardware store as baseboard molding. Looks really cool.

  This painting is also an example of when I started to depart from rectangular borders. Sometimes it started to look too baroque or romantic when it was all rounded edges so I've started to come back to rectangles again. I'll mention it when those images come up.

  Also one thing which I like to do is make the sky completely pure gray with no other color in it but make everything else yellow-brown. This makes the gray look blue-ish. Color-theory sucks as a class but it's fun to play around with it during your own work. You basically can learn everything you get from a class about color theory from using the sliders in photo editing software (like Photoshop).

  I've said a lot and said not much about the painting in question! That's the way the cookie crumbles though. You think there are too many links in this post? Yeah, maybe. That's also the way the cookie crumbles. They're crumbly cookies.

See you tomorrow! Please come back and see more artwork. Please. Also comment.

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