"My goose is gettin' cooked."

     My Portfolio Development class is having us choose a "thematic style" or aesthetic for a series of pieces over the course of the quarter. After thinking over a few ideas, the choice eventually landed on a more graphic cut-out technique as well as being loosely influenced by the term "mythology" and the "elements". So that's where I sort of took off with it; I started with a few sketches of what I thought a "fire creature" would look like, as well as a couple of other elements. Here's what I came up with:

     I had a hell of a time with this one because (as mentioned in the planar portraits project) the process requires so much preparation of the differing textures and surfaces that I spent hours just getting to the point of putting paint on something. But I also am really pleased with how it turned out. The creatures from the sketches ended up becoming these diving machine creations that are causing all sorts of destruction with their element. I like the idea of the fire-machines being these really tall gangly things that are able to shoot while walking over the flames and destruction on stilt-legs. Experimenting in a portfolio class might not be such a bad thing after all. Still, I'd say this one is draws heavily from my Three Musketeer illustrations from over a year ago.

Avast! A Self Portrait!

   This is the second "postcard" assignment from my portfolio class, the restriction was that we had to work in the style that we'll be approaching our final pieces of the class with. Our instructions were to paint our "alter-ego" in that style, in any medium and format. So, I drew up a couple of ideas and came up with this painting for a self portrait:

   There's a strange thing that keeps happening whenever I try to post this particular picture online because the colors always dull out. Maybe its' because the JPEG version has to cut a few corners, who knows. But I've tried several times to amp up the vibrancy in the colors and it always comes out looking a little flat. 

   This painting is the absolute direct result from me working digitally over the past year. For some reason, I can't seem to grasp the concept of putting paint down on canvas anymore; I have to work in layers for it to make sense to me. Everything on this painting is a cut-out shape that had been arranged and pasted together, which is more of a refinement from the planar portraits that I had done last quarter. To me, this painting felt like a stepping stone as far as the way I approach the working process. 

   Its' almost a combination of painting, collage, and digital refinement wrapped in one, and while working in this way cannot accomplish any of those particular things fully, I'm finding that it offers a couple advantages that is unique to the cut-out shape process. For one, because I am using the cut shapes, I'm able to arrange things exactly how I want them to look as I'm working, rather than planning everything out beforehand. This leads to a more spontaneous composition, which is like a godsend because I think I've always resisted the planning stages more than anything else while painting. Second, I was also able to paint with hard, defined edges that would take very careful precision if I were to paint them all regularly.

   The downside of course is that it is difficult to create contrasts because everything is created separately from each other. Without having everything around it to compare to, colors and value tend to go wherever they please, and the whole painting as a whole could have trouble feeling unified without touching it up in Photoshop afterward. That, and my arm fell off from the strain of cutting out the shapes, and my x-acto knife literally exploded from overuse. Now I only have one arm left, and a broken x-acto knife to cut it off with.

After Dark

Ah, finally I have time to be able to update a little more from my final year at SCAD. I've been almost constantly chipping away at several projects at once, but the first recently completed piece is a book cover for our Type and Image class. Embarrassingly, I hardly ever read, so my library of books that I had to chose from was limited to say the least. One book that I remember fondly though was After Dark by Murakami. Without going into any details because it is in fact quite late, the book to me was more or less about the night life of Japan that essentially became an organic being; there was something almost sentient about it that seemed to encapsulate everyone underneath. Here were four early sketches from the beginning stages: 

The first and the fourth ideas were the strongest, though since I felt that the first idea had been done over and over again, I decided on the last. This painting, in more ways than any other piece before this, really cemented in my head the digital process. Except for the sketch and a few textures, the piece was done completely in Photoshop and Painter in the same vein as my DLH album cover. Also, with this I feel like I have the strongest grasp on painting when it is done digitally, as if my ties to traditional media have been permanently cut (which is something that I am learning the hard way, as shown on a painting that I am currently working on). As I'm sure everyone saw coming, this painting is very dark and as a result the print-out version looked terrible. But, that was expected. I'll post the digital version so you can get a better grasp of what I was going for. I wanted to capture the feel of city-night in a more conceptual way, and there was a small debate about which way the "legs" should be facing.

Here is the final piece. Mind the lorem: