The fourth painting in the 'Seven Gates' series is very detailed. Imagine painting the image below - albeit in a slightly twisted manner - and you'll get the idea of just how much detail.
I worked on it for the whole of last week and by Friday night my hand was killing me. All of the joints, especially in my thumb, were feeling very sore and I was struggling to make a fist. The problem has been having my hand in a cramped position all week, performing minute movements.
After a weekend of rest my hand was feeling a lot better but when I tried to paint on Monday morning the pain came back straight away. I think it may need more rest.
So now I'm planning the fifth painting, making my free association lists, designing a creature and going out taking reference photos. And so far it's been the trickiest one to plan, but that's a story for another time. All of this means that the next two paintings will probably be finished at the same time in about two months. It's frustrating because I was only a month off finishing the fourth although it's probably best that I protect my hand.
For anyone else suffering with a similar complaint I was signposted to a couple of great links by the blog Nature's My Friend. I'll post them here too for ease:
This morning, I came up with a crafty plan to alleviate my hand issue. I thought I would paint in some of the slightly larger areas of the figures with my left hand. Turns out I'm not ambidextrous and they ended up looking more like this:
Next time I'll have a look at how limitations help with creativity. See you then.
'The Insidious Whisper' stems from times when a person's inner monologue goes rogue and becomes his or her worst enemy. But it does it slyly and sneakily, hidden in the mists of the mind so to speak. When this happens, it's not the most useful of things and its main objective is to criticise and generally put down its owner. What makes it so devious is that these thoughts are very hard to spot. But spotting them is the key to turning them around and beating back the foul beast.
My original idea was to have a large hulking creature sat in a wooded area, framed by a circle of branches and other foliage. (The work of Brian Froud - see above - was lurking around somewhere in my subconcious especially in the fairy tale fantasy feel that I was after.) On the creature's shoulder would have been a crafty little character whispering into its ear, a bit like the cartoon devils in various Looney Tunes cartoons, but more disturbing obviously. I went through the usual process of making lists of words through free association (for more on this click here). This radically changed the setting and the respective sizes of the figures. The whisperer became a large powerful beast and the other character a more dejected emaciated figure.
Luckily enough, when I was planning this painting there was fog every morning for about a week, so I went out with my camera taking reference photos in Conisbrough (around by the old Earth Centre) and by an old bunker in Rossington, affectionately known as 'The Shack'. I also went to an area of waste ground by the side of the Keepmoat stadium but I never actually used this area in my painting. Maybe another time...
To help sell the idea of the scale of the large figure I wanted to have interaction between him and the environment. I built scale models of the shack and other elements and took photos of myself in various hard to maintain positions. I then played around with this in Photoshop and twisted the figure into an even more improbable position. All of this work helped to solidify the final positions of the characters in my mind.
After this planning I drew out a rough outline of the buildings in perspective and the figures. After scanning this into the computer I played around with the positions of the tentacles - you can really see the Lovecraft influences coming out here - to lead the viewer around the painting, give a greater sense of scale and also use the z-axis in an interesting way.
Once the drawing was finished I printing it out and transferred it on to the illustration board ready for the painting stage. As you can see from this initial sketch I was going with the idea of a cracked earth explosion around the eye on the whisperer. This would change later on in the process, but we'll find out about that next time...
