Well, it’s been a minute since I’ve updated this (it’s always a whole heap of minutes it seems like when updating blogs) so I figured I would describe the process that goes into creating a piece, and some of the thoughts behind it.
Like most folks, I get inspiration from everything around me. Sometimes I want to portray an emotion, other times, I want to render something in a particular style. These days I’ve been focusing on curves (and for people that know me, that’s not a huge surprised at all), but not in the traditional way. I’ve been trying to get a flatter, more two dimensional look for my pieces, and let the swoops, curves and bends of the fuller woman’s form show up in contrast with either the background and against the figure’s own body. What I’ve come to realize is that it’s not that easy to do. I could do line drawings with no indications of volume, but never hit upon a style that really called to me. You can see some of my experiments with that sort of thing, here and here.
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The Shutterstock Image that was the basis of my piece[/caption]
Anyway, those were my initial thoughts about this piece. As far as poses go, I’ve been on a kick of women sitting or lying down. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s a reflection of me just being a tired layabout these days, but I wouldn’t put it past myself. The next step was to find a suitable pose, and this is when I hit shutterstock, an online stock photography resource that I happen to have access to. After searching for a while, this is the image that I found. Of course the model there, while classically attractive, wasn’t what I was looking for. She needed to be just a tad (and tad I mean about 200 lbs) more voluptuous. but I really was just looking for a pose off of which to base my initial sketch. I wanted the woman in the piece to be barefoot so I didn’t include the shoes.
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Here’s the pencil sketch[/caption]
Which led me to another problem. Feet are hard to draw! So that’s where I busted out Poser, a 3D modeling software package. It allows me to make a virtual poseable mannequin of a figure. I can change its size, position and lighting. I’ve used actual 3D rendering in some of my art a few times (see the front page of my art print site for an obvious example), but for the most part I use it to help with anatomy and lighting.
From there it’s on to the art itself. As I mentioned earlier, my original idea was for a flatter, less rendered look, but it’s something that I abandoned early on. It ended up looking like a poorly colored line drawing. Those experiments will have to wait for another piece.
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Final Artwork[/caption]
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