rush

If you saw my previous post then you might recognise this. Part something in Kinga's and my personal illustration project. Lady's choice this time, her topic was rush:

(acrylic paint on canvas, 60cm x 51cm/24" x 20")

I mentioned way, way back in one of my old posts that I had a blank canvas and an idea for a painting. Well, that never surfaced and I moved the blank canvas up onto a shelf. When I was given the topic rush back in March (1st March to be precise, I still have the text message... Wow! That was a long time ago) my initial ideas were to do with being in a rush, velocity/speed/moving too fast etc.

(detail)

A few days after the topic was announced I was sitting at my computer when all of a sudden a memory popped into my head. Nothing weird about that, you might think. People think about random stuff all the time. The problem this time was that it was a memory that felt very real but at the same time didn't make any sense. It felt incomplete and I tried as hard as I could to figure out what it was about and what the missing parts of the memory were. Do you know that feeling you get when you have a word on the tip of your tongue but you just can't seem to say it? As if it's there but it isn't? That's how I felt except it was a memory. For a good 10 minutes I sat there baffled, trying really hard to make sense of it, as well as figure out if what I was thinking was real or if my imagination had pieced together a bunch of different memories together and made something up. It's really difficult to describe in words the actual thing that I was trying to think of, and reading this back looks like the ramblings of a madman, but at the time I was really confused, definitely freaked out and actually a little upset. The next day I didn't care any more and the details of the memory were hazy. Strange...

(more detail)

After that weird episode my idea changed from being in a rush, to the feeling of a rush. A head rush, if you like. It also (for a different reason) made me finally paint on the canvas. My first revised idea was a person screaming with their head split in half and a whole mess of crap spewing forth (my memory) but that felt like it was going to be too complicated to do. I eventually refined that idea into what you see now. There's still a whole mess of crap but it's a much more organised mess.

First, I sketched my idea on tracing paper with brush pens. They were nice to draw with and I liked the blocky colour and sweeping qualities I was able to achieve with them on the smooth paper, particularly with the black outlines. It was like painting with a slippery paintbrush onto Teflon. Shame the paper was yellow though.

It wasn't possible to translate the brushstroke effect with paintbrushes. Yes, that seems like a contradiction, but it was because I was using acrylic paint which, if you've ever used in it's basic form, absolutely LOVES to dry out after a few minutes and fluid strokes turn into smears after a couple of passes. I tried thinning it with water but that made it too runny and transparent and I wasn't going to buy a retarding agent just for this. I ended up using a black UNI Posca pen instead. This made the black outlines less brushy and more graphic. Not what I intended to do but a nice (and probably better) compromise. The rest of the chaotic details (arrows, stars and other assorted bits and doo-dads) were drawn with black and white Posca pens. Posca pens are my new favourite thing. The name is also fun to say. Posca Posca Posca...

(from tracing paper to canvas)

I was going to paint the background black and flick in some white paint to make a white-to-black gradient, but that seemed like too much hard work. I then painted over the black with green and dark blue to introduce some colour but it was so transparent that it looked I just painted on black all over again. I ended up mixing the blue with white and that killed the transparency. Having a colour background meant that I could outline the figure in black, instead of outlining in black then highlighting it in white.

This took about 2 weeks from start to finish, on and off. Mostly off. It probably would have taken about a week if I didn't dilly-dally and keep screwing up. The most time-consuming part was obviously the details, but it's the details that makes this interesting, so I didn't want to rush (ba-dum ching!) them. Painting over failed colour choices also didn't help. Good thing I didn't do this in oil paint, I might still only be half-way through.

I'm not really happy with the eye, so I might work on that some more, but I guess the emphasis is supposed to be on the crazy hair and the patterns rather than the face. Also the face looks better in my first sketch, but the hair looks better in the painting, grr. I haven't signed it yet (hence all the watermarks), I don't know whether I want to sign it with my normal arty "squiggle" or tag it. I'm leaning towards a tag as the style of this is graffiti-based, but I don't know which tag to use. I might just sign the back of the frame. Decisions, decisions.

I have since tried to remember what the subject was that was lost in my memory, but it's just a vague recollection. All the details are gone and the urgency and confusion I initially felt is no longer there.

On a lighter note, after I painted the hair I suddenly had a craving for rhubarb and custard sweets.

Yum.

I didn't give in.

Enough with the wall of text. Enjoy rush.

(Click here for Kinga's take on the topic)