Works in progress: snakes and stuff

I woke up one day and felt like painting a snake. Luckily this is a dream I'm quite capable of fufilling, so I jumped right into it:

This is a terrible picture full of glare (it's glarrible!), but it gives you an idea. I wanted something up close and personal, sweet colors, a snake that's fierce, beautiful, captivating.

 You can see here that the snake begins to grow up, gets more definition, less of a shadow and more of a living thing.

After coating the snake with another layer of paint, I start adding scales.

This was really quite tedious.

But really quite worth it, I think.

I got a little frustrated trying to change the eye around, messing with different colors and things, so it lost a little bit of its luster as more scales were added. I'll get back to it. The scales, now that they're all more or less in there, will now of course need to be refined. And I don't know what'll be happenning in the background. Or what color the snake's eye, or even the snake itself, will end up being.

I based the snake's look on Atheris squamigera, a bush viper.

Photo from wikipedia. More here!

I knew I wanted to paint a viper of some sort (..I just like vipers?), and a search of viper species led me to squamigera, an exceedingly beautiful and captivating snake.

Next in line:

Flamingos! This is a considerably smaller painting, and it's not nearly as far along as its snakey roommate. Right now it's really no more than a rough sketch. We'll see what happens to it in a few weeks!

Next up is a really fun project: tape art!

The assignment: recreate a classic masterpiece of art, using a myriad of decorative and practical tape. I chose to work from this piece by Joan Miró. It called to me. So lively! So weird! So much detail! And cool shapes.

You can see I chose to zoom in to the little bug fellow. At first I was a little baffled by how on earth to work in tape, and thought, "goodness gracious, this is going to be tedious and insane." And yeah, it is kinda tedious (and maybe kinda insane), but as I got used to it, it became really fun, and really satisfying, too. Multiple rolls of tape, cutting, cutting, and more cutting, sticking and resticking, hands full of tape and scissors and multiple funky little pieces. There's almost a sort of rhythm to it.

I'm enjoying it way more than I thought I would at the beginning, and I love the subject I chose. This painting is really fun to explore, and recreate in my own way. And the tape itself is so charming.

Finally, we've got some colored pencil work:

If you give a rose to an artist, you can almost guarantee the artist is going to draw it, right? Isn't that some law of nature? Wouldn't nine out of ten artists agree? I dunno, but if you give me a rose, I'm gonna draw it, that you can say for sure. The color's so rich and vivid, the sentiment's so sweet, and if you stare at it for a week or so, well, how can you resist?

I hadn't worked in colored pencils in a long time! I felt rusty. They seem like they should be very simple, but I don't think they are. Lots and lots of layers, slow and steady work, building up the color and the form.

I think it's coming along really nicely. If I do so say so myself. Don't know what I'm going to do with the background yet, if anything. I do have a lot of colored pencils, so its nice to put them to use after they sat around for a while (I mean - vacationed for a while, in colored pencil land!). Good to remember the fun stuff they're capable of.

It's very motivational to look back and see how artworks have progressed!