Master of Carrion process...

Sometimes ideas just come into your head and you've got to get them out and onto paper. This was one of those. It's graphite and white charcoal on toned paper. Nice birdies....

Red Tara process...

I thought it about time to update the blog, keep it alive, even though it seems I'm using social media more and more to publish my work. I'll get this thing going again with a look at my process concerning a triptych commission based on Red Tara, a deity from Buddhist mythology. I spent over a week playing about in my sketchbooks, toying with ideas, concepts, compositions, etc. The usual process I follow, but especially for a fairly ambitious and complex commission like this. The biggest challenge was how I was going to reconcile the third panel with the others, as the idea of combining a futuristic cyber-punk type scene with more mythological and traditional elements was a daunting task. They needed to stand alone yet at the same time have a sense of flow, of shared themes and an aesthetic harmony. I had a fairly strong idea early on how I wanted to handle the first two panels, but I had to re-work the final one a few times. I got there in the end I think, although it only fully satisfied that sense of lingering doubt after I decided to imbue each panel with a certain time of the day; the first panel representing early morning, the middle panel the zenith of the day, and the third panel night. That gave it a stronger narrative structure that I felt I could more cheerfully work with. With regards the palette, the first panel is a combination of Quinacridone Red and Phthalo Green, which I'd never used before. I used the same combination for the kimono of Red Tara (the same friend by the way who posed for The Malignant Flower painting), which needed that intensity and high value. The third panel is largely a complementary pairing of orange and blue, for the most part anyway. I stretched the canvas for all of them myself, which has a satisfyingly organic feel to the whole process, plus it means I can dictate the size of them myself. A challenging commission all in all, but the journey starts again with the next project.

The Ascent process...

I would have liked a little more time on this, but that is often the case. I had just over a week to get it done, so I had to take a couple of 'short-cuts' here and there. It's painted on oil paper which I very rarely use. It tends to be either canvas or board that I work on, but actually it felt fine after I primed it with Clear Gesso (this gave it a bit of 'tooth', as the paper was relatively smooth). Instead of starting with an imprimatura (a thin wash of colour, usually a neutral, to cover the whole image and set the basic mood), I blocked in the basic light and dark masses with a quick ebauche (a preliminary layer of semitransparent oil colour). Once I set down the basic value structure, I worked on the sky first, and gradually moved to the middle, and then foreground figure, and ended up painting the birds last. I think the motion blur on the birds is too subtle now in hindsight. I should have pushed that further. In fact, I would have liked to spend another day on the birds, but alas, the time just wasn't there. I used a double complementary pairing for this painting; for the background (including the buildings) I used orange and blue, and for the foreground I went with a more violet and yellow-orange approach.

"What Pain Owns" process...

This was inspired by a poem I read months ago. I don't know who the writer is, but I found it deeply moving. I did a very ragged thumbnail sketch after reading it, just to make sure the idea didn't slip away as they sometimes do. It then got neglected for a couple of weeks, before the sketch reminded me of it again. I proceeded to paint it immediately after that. I changed the direction of the light source in the end, amongst other things, but the essence of the idea remained the same. It's done almost entirely in acrylic, with a fleck of oil in the final layer of paint. I know it's not my best painting technically, but I do have a soft spot for it...