Saturday, November 7, 2015

A Peak Inside my Portfolio: Flight Series

My students are currently working on an assessment drawing of a still life and photo students are in the film developing stages. Although I was tempted to post some still life pictures, I know we all know how to lead a project like that and it's not a terribly new idea. So for times like this, I decided to have posts either about project I'm working on or artwork I'm creating. Hence the last post about my home decor and now this post about my current work!

I'm taking some graduate level courses and right now and I'm in the thick of a studio painting class. We are working very large scale which is awesome and sometimes intimidating. For these paintings, I wanted my inspiration to come from flight. If I haven't shared this yet, my husband is a pilot and we are currently building a plane in our garage. So flying and flight have a huge impact on my life right now.

When I began thinking about flight however, I wanted to stay away from the idea of clouds and wind and blue etc... I didn't want the theme to be immediately obvious or cliche. Then I started thinking about the plane, the only way that humans can fly. The only way that we can experience flight is through a metal box and metal wings, hard and unyielding, which is totally at odds with the open and and wind currents and clouds.

To that end, I chose to do a series of paintings of plane parts that my husband has been working on. Primarily in monochromatic color schemes. To keep the idea of flight apparent, since these pieces don't appear to be plane-like yet, I made the background very airy and cloud-ish.

I haven't actually finished any of them, but they're all awesome works in progress and I'm excited about this series.

Just finishing the background area of the first painting.

Here's my sketch of the basic shapes.

Blocking in darks and lights.

Refining...

And more... it's almost done, this is how far I am :)

Number 2, same process.




Pretty much finished I think...

Third piece, this is the only one that is for sure finished.







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