Good Ship Rhino ~ color study

After looking at my composition for two days straight, I've decided I'm not happy with it. The left side looks like I simply ran out of paper and I may have to change the entire format. In the meantime I thought it wise to do a color study of my main subject, especially because I'm merging an animal with a manmade object. Will it 'read right' when contour and color are added? I've decided to submit this to a critique forum and get some feed back. I'll see what others have to say(if anything) and post any comments and suggestions on my blog. It should prove interesting and hopefully enlightening.

The Good Ship Rhino ~ WIP 3

This looks a little rough because in some areas there are 2-3 layers of tracing paper overlapping.The vertical cut on the right was made to tighten the width of the format. I simply sliced the chosen area and slid it over to the left.

This will be the last update of my sketch before the final. There are still a few things I plan to adjust but I'm close to completion. Once I'm completely satisfied I will do a final tracing and post that before tranferring the drawing onto my working paper. As weird as this may look it is surrealism. I plan to post my thought process while working on this. I must say, it's a great deal of fun to let my imagination run wild and free. I love fantasy, cats, critters and who knows...before this is done there may be a few flowers that show up. Flowers are another love of mine. So fun to include it all in one painting.

The Good Ship Rhino ~ WIP 2

This project has begun to turn into a monster, literally and figuratively. As the ideas increase, so has the size of the sketch and my teacup has sprouted tentacles. I now have this taped to my biggest mounting board on my tabletop easel on the kitchen table. I snapped these photos just now so I could post a quick update. I've made some changes to the original sketch and added an overlay of tracing paper showing some possible additions.

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.