Breathe

Breathe
Medium: watercolors
Size: 11x11 inches
Detail closeups -here-
Prints and original available -here-

For my personal Christmas cards this year, if I can get around to getting them printed up and mailed in time, moving at the snail's pace I've been going this year! Played around with my box of blue magic from Kremer. I love these pigments!

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Some of the sketches and in progress shots:

Sketchbook scribbles. Brainstorming.


More sketchbook brainstorming.


Playing with composition in photoshop, combined face and tilt of head and neck from one sketch with the attitude and pose of the body from another. I liked the movement that the diagonal from her arms created. The second figure felt too static. But her expression suited what I wanted.


Finalized transfer sketch.

Breathe in progress

In progress piece. Playing around with my Kremer blues.

Inner Workings

Inner Workings

Size: 15x19 inches
Medium: Watercolors
Closeup detail views -here-
Prints and original available -here-

The strange and beautiful tie of the rules of mathematics and physics, to the organic wonder and growth of life and nature.


Some of the in progress shots:

Time

Inner Workings Finalized Sketch

In response to those who have objected to my integrating steampunk elements into this piece, I want to address a bit. While there is just steampunk for steampunk's sake (Claire's halloween costume for example. :) ), I feel that this piece is not in that category. At a glance it is swiftly slotted into what we all conceive of as "steampunk" these days because ANYTHING with clockwork is automatically put into that genre now.

What this piece is about, and what I hoped the title would convey, was not simply just jumping on the steampunk-wagon. It's a juxtaposition of man-made vs. natural and how the two flow in and out of each other (a common theme in my other works as well). It is the imposition of human conception of time parceled out into cycles of seconds and minutes, with the natural diurnal rhythms that exist regardless of our recording and observation of. The pendulum arc of the girl on the swing is an echo of this rhythm as well.

But also, however random nature seems to be, when you come down to the building blocks, at its heart nature is a vast, fantastic, incredible machine which manifests itself over and over in geometric and mathematical ways. There is a strange tie of such hard physical science to subjective beauty and life. When that becomes most evident is at that juncture where we meet the natural world.

Our bodies are aware of time on a level that our minds have more difficulty grasping. We have internal biological rhythms that coincide with the moon each month, and with the flow of day and night. I mentioned a month ago about Claire's first recognition of the moon in the sky, and it was a comment that Dana made that night about how she seemed to know it already that gave an initial spark to this concept. Even barely knowing the word "moon" and never having laid eyes on it, her physical body was already attuned to it and the cycles of time.

Inner Workings Sketch

A sneak peak at a piece in progress (partial scan of the full size).

I had so much fun with the sketches and designing for Claire's halloween wings, that I got inspired to do a painting along those lines. I've been in a bit of an idea-rut lately, so I'm pretty excited about this because it sprang to mind as a full-fledged concept, along composition, colors and title, which will be "The Inner Workings of Life".

I think I'll be trying some fixative layering on this too, on a larger scale now than the experimental pieces I've been toying with in the past couple months. It will be interesting to see how it works for a more ambitiously sized piece.

The sketch is taking forever though, on the illustration board. All the little gears and cogs are making my drawing hand ache!

More Steampunkaliciousness!

All done! Now to chase down that kidlet and see if she'll wear it.... The top pops off so that I can drop one of those LED pumpkin tea-lights into the canister. The entire thing is made of foam (and a chopped up old contact lens saline solution bottle). The only actual metal is in the D-rings I used to secure the shoulder straps.

Dana thinks this little detail is excessively silly:

Spirits of the Wind

Spirits of the Wind

Medium: Ink
Size: 9x14 inches
Detail closeups -here-
Prints and original available -here-

Very roughly based on this photo I took last year. A live oak tree out in a grassy field, with the swirl of clouds spilling out above it. When I posted it on deviant art, people were commenting that the clouds looked like a dragon.

Playing around with the idea a little bit, and planning to eventually do a painting along these lines.