The Seasons: "Spring"

Last fall I began working on a series of oil paintings, "The Seasons". I completed "Fall" and posted the entire process, here.



I meant to continue on during the Winter and early Spring, but was delayed; I am a Senior Artist at the game company Zynga and am now on the Cityville art team, which means I need to dedicate a lot of my attention to work. Before I moved to the team, I had enough time during my off hours to complete a complex freelance project for a tv show proposal called, "The Royal Ladybugs" and also took a fantastic classical realism painting workshop with Sadie J. Valeri in January, where I also attend open life drawing sessions once a week. All in all, I've been pretty damn busy! SO much so, that I decided to set aside life drawing for the summer and get back to my painting "Spring" so that it is ready for the APE festival in October.

There is always a silver lining to putting projects in my art drawer for a while. I crave time to work on them, but often when I put my work away and come back to it after a several month hiatus, I find that I have fresher eyes on the subject. When I took out my thumbnails for the series out of my drafting table drawer for the first time in months, I immediately saw that they needed some work.

All of these are "post" thumbnail, meaning I had developed several versions of each and landed on these designs, which I had meant to take to final pencils. There are two "Summer" ideas, and the "Winter" piece I was not happy with at the time - mainly because she is a full body and I had decided to only include 3/4 of the torso in each painting. (one of the "Summer" pieces is full body too, which I also nixed).  For now I want to focus on redesigning "Spring". Part of what bothers me is the expression on her face as well as placement of the figure.

Over the Memorial Day weekend,  I began by tackling some new thumbnails. Here are (some of) my new thumbnails.

The thumbnail I like the most is this, however I've lost something in the original and want to make sure that the style and feel of the piece matches the others, including the finished "Fall" piece.

Next, I will now move ahead with some more development; I need to match the style as mentioned, play around with the design a bit, and also want to do some small studies of bees and butterflies. I will also take some reference photos of the figure to make sure the anatomy is making sense. even though this is a stylized figure, i want to be sure to have reference from reality so that i can simplify and interpret from an accurate starting point rather than guess.

I am inspired to study the way plants and flowers grow by a book I picked up recently, "Botony for the Artist" by Sarah Simball.

The pen and ink drawings inside, are gorgeous studies. The book however is not simply a picture book filled with drawings; it contains several chapters on categories of plants, and explains the structure of each type with some pen and ink examples. What really makes this book interesting is the addition of the historical scientific process of other highly regarded artists and examples of their work.
Sarah Simball also discusses the interesting materials for her pen and ink line work: diluted Chinese ink in two shades of gray, a pen nib and Japanese brushes. For a thorough understanding of botany and how it applies to the artist's needs, I highly recommend "Botony for the Artist".

Which brings me to my next post. Structure. I took down extensive notes and did some additional research about the subject and will be posting about it soon, as stated. It seems to me that working on studies of bees and butterflies is a great parallel with some of my notes. Please stay tuned and thank you for visiting!