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Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Wreck of the Good Ship Rhino & a Shag ~ WIP



Inspired by the work of Yuri Laptev, I recently visited Paint My Photo (link) to gather some ideas. I haven't been on this site for ages and was amazed at the quantity and quality of photographs in their gallery. Over 1600 images, all copyright free. I found a wonderful image of a rhino, resting in a zoo enclosure, and saved it to my on-site 'favorites'. Later I stumbled onto another image of a beached fishing boat, falling into decay. The overall shape and angle of incline reminded me of the rhino. I did a tracing of the boat, then overlaid that onto the rhino image and they meshed perfectly. An idea was beginning to form. I added the cormorant later. Whenever I include a new 'critter' in my artwork I like to learn a little bit about it first. Googling revealed that the slang term for a cormorant is a shag. Cool!

I'm now in the process of creating what I like to call a storyboard. Whenever I create a piece from multiple images I like to work on tracing paper. Each element is drawn or traced onto separate scraps of paper so they can be moved/removed and adjusted into various compositions on a board. Because the tracing paper is transluscent every layer is always visible. An example of this process can be seen in the WIP Cawcus (link) , a painting I completed last year. I'm currently jotting down more ideas for this project in a small notebook as they come to me. It should be fun to see this evolve and what comes of it.

2 comments:

renate said...

I'm sure you will surpise us again:) I already love the idea!!

Billie Crain said...

Thanks! This is going to be a fun project, Renate. I can just tell. No bounderies in surrealism. Anything goes.