Okay! Now that the Holidays are over, and my internet connection restored, I can get back to updating my site and this blog.
Here we have my last painting for the advertising illustration class that I finished this past semester. Our assignment was to design an album cover. Now, album art is a very broad subject; it varies as widely as music does, so this was essentially an open assignment. Our image just needed to fit into a square composition.
The music that I listen to today is pretty heavy. I am a big fan of metal, hard rock, and alternative. However I don’t like to take myself, or my music too seriously. Therefore I wanted to create an image that is so badass that it approaches the line of being comical. When I was little, one of my favorite things to draw were lizards with big scary teeth. Now that I’m a full grown and fully trained painter, looking over my portfolio I didn’t seem to have any lizards in it! What a shame. This was the perfect opportunity, I thought, to add my favorite lizard, the Komodo Dragon to my animal repertoire. Other things that I liked while growing up were fire, and space. In this painting I am combining all the major visual elements from my childhood into an extremely personalized painting.
I am really happy with how it turned out, even though the fire ball did give me some trouble. I am very confident when it comes to painting solid surfaces like skin, rock, and even reflective surfaces like ice and metal, but give me a fluid surface like water or fire, and I have somewhat of a more difficult time conveying that fluidity and translucency. Most of the painting is done in watercolors and colored pencil, but the gaseous nebula and fireball were painting in opaque tube acrylics because it is much easier for me to paint light coming out of darkness using an opaque medium.
