After being tied to a project for so long it's a bit floaty to be untethered. It's often hard to know what to work on. This time I have something to digest, but how I go about that is wide open. So I'm experimenting.
I am wanting to do something BIG with LARGE blocks of color.
If I do that, I can't really share it with you. Those crayon pictures I did are actually very beautiful, but they are larger than my scanner. With the light available I can only take a terrible photo which strips away everything about the picture that makes it worthwhile.
Been looking at my copy of Jules Verne: the Man Who Invented the Future by Franz Born, illustrated to perfection by Peter P. Plasencia. (Ward-o-Matic has posted the illustrations on flickr.) These pictures are small -- the book is about seven inches wide and ten inches tall -- yet as you can see the pictures are epic. Huge, somehow. He has such incredible depth while still flattening and stretching things the way you must do if you work on paper. I don't know quite how he does it, and one of my next missions is to find out. To come to terms with perspective.
My instincts are still a bit too realistic. I keep correcting things. Overlapping something as it actually appears, rather than showing it off as one is able to do in the world of painting. Anything can be seen. Should everything? Shouldn't some things still be partly hidden behind other things, to create interest and drama? I have smaller goals. Find that pistachio color. Loosen up a little (which, I hope, will help with perspective), bring people comfortably in the world. Digest some of those things I keep wanting to digest -- particularly the adventure stories. Ireland, Canada, San Diego. I really don't want to go anywhere else until I digest those adventures.
Some of these things can be done as I make some pictures about Fair. Other things will just require a lot of looking and a lot of desk time. Which is really all I ever want.
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