Newest WIP Shots for "Psalm 88"

My latest version of "Psalm 88" now has glorious sea foam, the boat pointing in the opposite direction, and tighter rendering of the face, hair, suit jacket, and tie. If you click on the first image and scroll between the two images in the pop-up window, you can see the differences more readily.

"Psalm 88" WIP

The next painting in my undergraduate senior project to get a facelift is one called "Psalm 88".

 

Like the others in the series, this one is also in oil. It met a minor tragedy after I had tried to apply liquid varnish when the paint was still wet. The night before I had to frame and hang the piece, I experimented with baking the finished painting in the oven. Much to my dismay, the painting was still very wet and I had to make some fast decisions, moving the paint around along with the fast-drying varnish so I would still have a relatively even coat instead of fail puddles. You see those cool vertical black streaks? Yeah...

One of the first things I did was flip the canvas. The painting now reads much closer to the narrative I want with the head coming first, then the hand, then the ship--granted you read a painting from left to right. The face is much different in a good way. It looks less like my face and more like my model's face now.

I also centered the body better and gave a tilt to the ship. Now that I mention it, I notice that the tilt of the ship is nearly parallel with the tilt of the body, so I will be changing that too...

You will also notice some blobby things underneath the man's body. Those will be fish. Lots of fish. The original painting had a handful of fish too, but many were swallowed by the wrath that is varnish.

This cool guy is made out of Sculpey clay and paper on a stick. He is my helpful fish-stick I am using as the ultimate source of reference. Trust me, you just won't find a photo of a school of fish swimming towards a camera.

I downsized the head a little bit and now I have started to delineate the fish. As I outlined the fish, I decided that I would keep the fish 2-dimensional looking. I think the effect successfully preserves the silhouettes of the fish (helping with compositional balance), emphasizes their symbolic importance in the painting's narrative, and most importantly, looks really cool.

More in-progress shots coming next week!

Finished Mantis Mascot

Here is my fleshed-out mantis mascot, Mr. Monocle, for my Monocle Mantis Design alias.You can look at the previous post to see in which part of the poster he will appear in.

You'll notice the shadows are very gray. I have my shadows below my shape layers that are set to multiply. I might try to rearrange things so I can set those shape layers to "color" layer mode and put some colors in the shadows. However, I have decided that my shadows needn't be too realistic as the gray shadows remind me of hand-colored black and white photographs before the age of color photography, which works well with the aesthetic I'm going for.