ES Starting Point.

These two pieces were my starting points for getting back to my beloved elephant skull.

I had a tutorial a couple of weeks ago and I thought it would be best to have some work started, so the tutor and me had something to talk about. I started from what I had decided in my ‘Scraped A Pass' post and it worked… Well, when I say worked, I mean she didn't tell me to stop with the elephant skull. She kept telling it was just a starting point, but I know I won't budge from using it.

This skull has become an obession of mine and I’ve realised that that is how a lot of my art works happen, I remember being in first year and working from objects I had found. I would recreate it again and again, until I got to a final point.

With the work above, I just went for it. I didn’t look at any reference photographs and this is what happened. I started with the backgrounds this time and I let that affect what colours I used on the image of the object. I then used three colours which I thought worked well together and put washes on until the shape was filled. I worked on them simultaneously which I never usually do. You can see that was more carefree with these and left the paint drips. These bits of canvas had been painted on before which is why you can still see patches of it underneath through the process. This is what lead me to paint over the background so I could then try to redo them in a flat colour. I did try this but it didn’t work.I attempted to paint the one with the yellow background again, but within minutes I knew it wasn’t going to work and I shall be covering it in white again.

For now they are finished and I doubt I shall go back to them as I have moved on. I will fill you in on this in the next post.