Day: 13 "The God Inside":
The first photo montage piece in the 99 paintings series. As I've said, this undertaking is designed to be a growth experience for me as an artist, so I'm looking forward to dabbling more with photo montage and digital painting.
I have to say, I had a blast with this image. I had no as to what I was going to do. I started with the head and was going to try and do something gritty and creepy (my usual - right?). Then I put the fuchsia leaf behind his head and the piece suddenly took on a whole different feel. It felt exulted and powerful, infused with energy and oddly a spiritualness that I wasn't expecting. So I went with it, adding elements at random and playing with shapes and colors. The centipede created a nice movement and even that felt spiritual to me, like a celestial oriental dragon or some symbol of uncoiling imagination and creative inspiration. It also lead to the scorpion-like crown.
The neat thing about photoshop and using the difference filter is that if often puts me into color palettes that I never would paint in in oils. All and all the surprise factor on this piece made for one great experience.
I know what you mean about 'color palettes' that you'd never use in oil or traditional mediums. It was after I started playing in photoshop that some of my traditional color palattes changed - I started playing around with unexpected colors in acrylic and got some pretty crazy effects (that appear digital sometimes) hehe.
ReplyDeleteThe image you have here is really interesting - I was immediately reminded of the book I'm reading right now - 'The Great and Secret Show' by Clive Barker - one of the characters has basically become a god, but he is corrupt - and creates bizarre creatures by collecting the fear out of people - one of which is a centipede like creature.
Keep up the play, I'm enjoying the show!
my new medium is a sewing machine.
I also just tried Yupo paper (synthetic, plasticish, but really awesome) If you havn't triey Yupo yet, I highly suggest getting some and playing with it! more receptive to water mediums than you'd expect a plastic to be - just to share my own experiment, this is what I made with watercolor, ink and colored pencil on yupo: here
Hey Lydia,
ReplyDeleteI really like your work...you're so free and playful in a arabesque way. I see what you mean about your colors, too.
I'm going to check out Yupo - thanks. I did buy something similar called "Multimedia Artboard" (DickBlick.com) that another artist told me is resin infused paper which can take water mediums and oils without rotting or priming. I suspect it is Yupo with a different name.