The skull that started it all!
Skull 01
I’ll start this one off with – my favorite color is green. I had to do a green skull! But in all seriousness, I painted this one after listening to Marco Bucci talk about making color, shadow, and shape “interesting.” For instance, if you define ALL the edges or blend all the edges, the viewer has no “work” to do. The viewer doesn’t have to think about what’s going on in the actual making of the piece because it’s been done for them. Now I think that painting like that is perfectly valid in many cases, but I do love the “look” he was talking about, particularly when I saw that he showed John Singer Sargent’s work as an example. I really admire Sargent’s work, and I’ve wondered how he was able to make even a “simple” subject look so interesting and captivating. Of course I wanted to try it out; even if I didn’t totally capture the exact look, I wanted to see what I could do!
Video
I unfortunately did not film myself creating this one, but I will make sure to film as many as possible because I love to watch how a painting comes together and I know that some of you do, too! Since I didn’t make a video, I’ll do my best to explain how I went about this one:
I got out a bunch of greens, blues, yellows, and purples (and made a few mixes myself of course), and had fun with it. I made the basic shape with a relatively large flat brush, careful not to make anything too “neat” or detailed… and then decided to keep up with that brush for a while because I was enjoying how the shape of the skull was popping through yet it had a strong abstract feel to it. I softened certain areas to see if I could make it look like it faded into the background, which helped diversify the shapes. It was harder for me to use colors in “weird” areas, but it helped to try to stay more abstracted. I eventually moved on to smaller brushes, adding lines and smaller brushstrokes, then giving the face of the skull a little more detail. I’m not positive I achieved the exact result I was going for, but I really like how it turned out, and I know I have many more to go, so I can always try these things out in another one too! 🙂
Spooky Film: In the spirit of the season, I also thought I’d recommend a spooky film with each post, so today’s recommendation is “Tales from the Darkside” – mostly for the “Cat from Hell” story. Now I love cats (I have two and would have more but can’t due to apartment rules) and I don’t think that cats are scary, and I hate the stigma around black cats (I grew up with two adorable friendly black cats and one very cranky calico), but… the end of that story… I love it and am creeped out by it. So if you like spooky movies and haven’t seen it… enjoy spookycat (and the rest of the stories too). 😉