Tired & Happy

My hands are covered in black and red marker pen and i'm a very tired but very happy artist after the final appearance of 2009, more blogging tomorrow...

Hired Help

My Impossimal sculpture was no where near dry this morning so instead of smoothing and painting him I decided to take a few photographs to see where the shadows will fall on the painting I have in mind, after a few snapshots I decided on this pose giving a nice contrast between the light and shadows.

I had to re-balance him on the seat though as the drying process had made him lighter on one side than the other so you can see two little blobs of blu-tac tipping him back to maintain balance.

And from the model and photograph it took another two hours to paint and smooth his round shape in the middle of this complex scene (you can only see 5% of the scene) and it's already starting to look more realistic, pity I don't have the time to make all my paintings as models.

And finally...

Tomorrow is my last appearance of 2009 and with a few great originals lined up for the event it should be a great day, the fun starts at 12:00pm and I will be there until well after 3:00pm so if you get chance come down to what promises to be the busiest Peter Smith event of the year!

Sunday 29th November
12-3pm
The Original Art Shop

Trentham Gardens

Stoke-On-Trent

Not Wallace & Gromit...

I often find that working with Impossimals your imagination has to fill in the gaps in reality, I cannot find anybody who looks like an Impossimal and when I feel my mind goes on overload thinking about a pose I resort to modelling the Impossimal so I can view it from all angles.

I don't think I have blogged about this stage before so here goes...

First of all I make the rough shape of the Impossimal in foil, it saves on the expensive air drying modelling material and helps it to stay light weight, here you can see the body and the nose roughly formed.

The next stage is to start putting on the air drying modelling clay, you don;t have to be too accurate at this stage because when you push the pieces together you have a lot of adjusting to do before it looks right, I also make any props at this stage out of balsa wood which for this model is a little wooden stool and a box room to help with shadows.

Here's the piece nearly done, he has the seat in place and he's fixed to this using cocktail sticks, it's not very smooth yet because you need to let the clay dry and then you can sand it smooth and paint it the colours you need, that's a job for tomorrow as it needs at least 24 hours. Once it's finished though I will have an Impossimal that I can pose and light using small spotlights and this will allow me to paint this particular painting a lot more accurately than before.

Small Tree Tall Tree

Painting the 'Tree Of Love' was never going to be easy, for a start I wanted a really twirly tree full of stylized branches each coming to a natural end or in this case a small heart shaped diamond to be attached later so the initial sketch on the canvas looked like this...

A little messy but it didn't look too bad so I started to block in the colour, primarily the tree and hearts first so I didn't lose them when I started painting the rest of it.

Once this base coat was on I could then work on the background confident that the tree and hearts would show through even if I did paint over them and I did but once the background had dried I went back and repainted the tree and hearts this time with more detail.

The eyes came next, those soulful blue eyes looking back at the tree was important to get right, I also painted in some of the Impossimal shading to start to give the sense of depth.

The final painting session put all the colour in place and once that was dry I added a layer of string gel to the background and loads of small mirror hearts and diamond additions so it sparkles like a million dollars in the right light.

'Tree Of Love'
©2009 Peter Smith

Two Be or Not 3D

I wonder why when you go and see a 3D film they have to model the glasses on Austin Powers? Glancing around halfway through watching Disney's 'A Christmas Carol' today the entire cinema looked like a bad day on the set of Austin Powers 4 (where Dr.Evil creates clones of Austin Powers to fight his mojo but inevitably clones himself and mini me with hilarious results) as I gazed upon rows of bespeckled people and a few even remembered to put in their comedy teeth as well wear a bad wig. (I'm a bad dog for even saying that last bit, sorry)

Still the film was good reference material and I have now come back with two pairs of 3D glasses plus a good idea on how to paint it, this combined with a new book I'm reading called 'Imaginative Realism' or 'How To Paint What Doesn't Exist' and I can feel a big painting change looming on the horizon again.

Highway To Hell

This looks really weird, a metal looking path strewn with objects including skulls, not very Impossimal or cuddly is it? Well you would be right, it's not my normal type of work but I wanted a bit of fun today so I started raiding the house for all manner of things to attach to a canvas to produce a quite dark and sinister picture called 'The Collector'. I do have my moments and paint some pretty weird stuff and today was one of them as the 'Collector' took shape and these objects littered themselves around the canvas looking like a macabre picture frame around a very dark square centre. The story is about a collector of objects and goes a little something like this...

'The collector collects, collects for a time when he collects no more but for now the collector collects because the collector only collects.'

This will be written around the edge of the canvas, hopefully I will be able to show you a little more of this next week.

On a happier note here's 'The Tree Of Love' from October this year. :-)

Rubber

One of the paintings I have been working on today required a lot of hearts, not painted this time but 3D raised away from the canvas hearts so I had to resort to a couple of other things to make them. First of all I modelled four heart sizes in plasticine, layed them out in a makeshift tray and poured latex and thickener over them and left them to set. Once that had dried I peeled out the plasticine hearts and I was left with the above, a heart shape casting mould, so I mixed up some plaster and set to work making the hearts.

I did quite well as I managed to get seven sets out of it even though I was painting four other originals at the time, they dried so quickly and could be pressed out of the moulds within ten minutes of the plaster being poured. Tomorrow I'll have a go at painting them ready to go on the canvas.