new Ideas

This is another idea that Jake has passed onto me to do as part of our collaborative ideas. He has given me the skeleton o work with so that I can map and design what the outside of the creature will look like. This creature is part fish part cat; a Catfish. However, evolution has made this fish have the legs of a cat but the res of the body is fish, with fish fins and tail. The creature will mainly have the scales of the fish over the body, but the rest, the legs of the creature, are to be covered in cat fur. I have done a compostional sketch of this creature in my sketchbook, but to get a colour compostion if this becomes a serious idea to take forward, I may need to do a few paintings to get the colours correct, though i will be using the natural colours of the animals, it just depends what visual imagery i can collect together to inform the colour combinations.

Body plan of Jakes BatBird and new ideas

I took a copy of jakes plan of the creature through tracing it from his studio to take home to work with, as i need to make a start on the collaboration work with jake. Also discussed what other creatures Jake has created that may look interesting to do. Decided upon a creature that was a fish with legs as this could be a more likely strain of evolution to happen as the BatBird is less of a possibility to happen and appears more fanatsy.

This afternoon i spent working on the birdman painting. I managed to complete the wing i was doing and then start the second wing. I managed to work on the join of feather between skin, making the feathers get smaller and further apart the closer they got to being in contact with the human skin.

I started too outline the edges of the feathers as this helped me too plan in advance where the feathers would be going and it helped me too work faster. At the moment i am really enjoying this painting, and i am combining the colours of the skin and the greys and whites of normal feathers into the colour pallet of the feathers to give it a more natural look and a feeling of the two seperate creatures joining together.

This is as far as i got to with the feathres today. I managed to nearly complete this whole wing but not quite. The next thing i need to do is to finish this wing and start the next wing.

I also did the last coat of my primer onto the canvas today and it appears to have stretched really well. I think i may have done the last coat of primer with too much pva glue, i shall have too see what effect this has on my abstracted painting next week.

After restretching my canvas with water and waiting for it to dry, i went back to my painting and started on the feathers. Originally, i was going to go to a craft shop and buy some feathers that I could then collage into my painting to give it a more 3d shape and be less flat. However, i started to paint the feathers in as i thort this wud give the collaged feathers a nice background to go against. When i started painting though, i found i liked the detail in the feathers i was creating and it seewmed a shame to blot this out with a collage of feathers, so i decided against it and carried on with painting the feathers.
Also, i primed my canvas with a standard primer of watered down PVA. managed to do 2 coats of this through the day.

To get away from working on the birdman painting for a bit, i decided i would begin a larger canvas painting of the abstraction of inside the body. To save on my studio time by making a frame, i went to see if any of the old frames from the previous year would be suitable. I found one that was just the right size, as i wanted one that wasnt too massive but big enuf too allow me more room for experimentation. I then stretched my canvas to the frame, but i did not do it well enuf so before priming the frame, i tried too tighten up my canvas by just using a water wash over the front and sides of the canvas to tighten it. This would then enable me to work on a stronger canvas that was less likely too sag.