The twenty-fourth skull!
Skull 24
This skull was done in a similar format as the last skull, but starting from a white background (I know, I like to start with black canvases, so I had to switch it up a bit!) and focusing on trying to make it look “cloudy” instead of “smoky”. The hand was another later addition when I realized that I was pushing the clouds around the cloud-skull rather than having the cloud-skull necessarily “in front of” all the other clouds. The hand then made it feel like it was crawling its way out of the clouds to be free, in a way. At least, that’s how I was feeling at about the time I put in the hand. Plus, I think the skull was a little too far to the left, so I think it helped the composition to make it feel more “even.” Of course, now it looks a little more like skull 7 than I intended… oh well, new experiments with similar subjects are bound to have a little of that! Another fun part about this painting was that it was a bit of the reverse of what I’m used to since I let the white empty space be the area that was the skull that I filled in last. So rather than defining the skull with big general shapes and then brightening light areas and deepening shadows, I started with giant white space and dark areas around the skull to let the skull “shine through” and then I just added cloud shapes and shadows in the blank area. I’m not sure if that makes sense, but it certainly felt a lot different when I started this one, so more experiments with skulls, woohoo!
Video
Music: “Cloud Patterns” by Silent Partner
Spooky Film: Today’s spooky film of the day is “Coraline,” a spooky film… maybe for kids? Definitely a creepy film for kids, haha. Try it out if you haven’t seen it and see what you think! 😀