A Little Halloween robot...

The Great Pumpkin

(Oil, 9x12") Framed.   Price: $250.00

The Great Pumpkin (Drawing) 

(Pencil, 9x12) Matted.   Price: $75.00  SOLD

 

I've always wanted to paint a Halloween robot...and use my little pumpkins as well. This idea surfaced when I was painting another robot earlier in the year, and I was flicking back through the reference photos I took at Mark's house in San Francisco in 2010. This little robot and his pumpkin were rejects from a previous idea...the line up for my MECHANIZED HARVEST painting. He didn't work out in that painting, but I still thought he looked massively appealing and paintable. Orginally, I had the robot looking ominous in a Frankenstein way in the design form while it was still in my head, but when it came to sketching him out, the robot looked kind of nervous and scared. I went with that instead, as it had more feeling. The result is a cute painting that I'm quite fond of. Strangely enough, since I've been doing the recent detailed pre-drawings for my paintings, people have told me that my sketching is way more confident than it used to be. Kind of chuffed about that. One very professional artist asked me why I worked on detailed drawings instead of doing most of the creating with the paint on the canvas. Well, with reference photos, you can't always see the edges of something or the details lost in shadow, so I like to pin those down ahead of time and not hit a bump in the painting process later on. Also, when you're working out a complicated composition, it's nice to have the exact placement of objects that satisfy the artist as well as the viewer - it makes for a tighter final design. And believe me, I can futz around with placement of elements for hours. I usually only start painting without a pre-sketch if I'm working on something very simple, like one of my small bird paintings.

There's a limited palette with this painting: Titanium White, a little Cadmium Lemon, Cadmium Orange Hue, French Ultamarine, Burnt Sienna, and a little bit of Pthalo Blue and Alizarin Crimson. Brushes were essentially the same ones I used in the last painting. The Pthalo went into the highlights around the moon and bird, whilst the Alizarin Crimson was used sparingly in the shadows to give them depth. Rule of thumb is: moonlit shadows are warm, and sunlight shadows are cool.

Anyway, there are more paintings to post...so come back soon and see.
Cheers
Marianne