I started off this week by painting the small wood panel that I primed previously. I was feeling quite inspired by the composition of the fox and rabbit in the Switzerland landscape that I sketched. It reminded me of the Studio Ghibli film Princess Mononoke from the mountainous scenes and the wolf gods. It is a film that has always greatly inspired me, in visuals and in meaning. It speaks a lot in terms of man vs. animal, and man vs. nature… the animation is not shy of gore either, the raw and violent image of war.
Taking light colors, I paint in the scene I sketched with watercolours and ink, as well as spray paint. I experimented with different ways of colouring in areas of the board. I used the same technique I used on the block again, which was spray painting on top of moving water/ink, so that the pigment of the spray paint floats on top and settles in an intricate and random way. I’ll definitely use this technique in the final painting as well, since I am thinking of painting a bigger piece after this one. What has always challenged me was the choice of color, I am usually unsure which colors to use for the figure, the background.. in the end I go with very similar color schemes. Even so, I do like the colors I choose, which are usually red, pink, blue, purple, and white. This may seem suffocating after using these colors repeatedly, but for now I feel that they fit the concept of what I am going for, which is the faded, painful effect.
I liked how the small painting turned out, liked it more than i expected, since painting it in water color gave it a significantly contrasting visual to the original sketch. The medium gave it more life. After the experimentation of painting on this, I’m now more confident in commencing my bigger piece. I primed the leftover boards that I bought from the wood shop, and looked for more animal hunting imagery, and dead animal pictures for sketching reference. After a few sketches, I had the idea of ‘morphing’ the animal parts together. Instead of a normal fox-with-rabbit-in-its-mouth I could have rabbit-with-fox-growing-out-of-its-body. Wouldn’t that be more intriguing and twisted? I came up with this sketch below, largely inspired by dead rabbit imagery. While I was at it, I cut off its head as well. It could symbolise the losing of the mind, the ultimate death, detachment, and disassociation.
Using the long primed piece of wood, I sketched out my drawing in pastels. Then I laid down the first layer of ink in the background, blue toned. I opted for red for the rabbit to emphasise the danger it is in and its pain. The piece of wood was leaner than I expected, but this worked to me advantage because it gave a really cramped sense, like the animal was really trapped inside that frame. Apart from water color, I also used a bit of white acrylic to emphasise some parts. I added the eyes in random places on the animal’s body, so it just ended up looking like an abstract monstrosity of animalistic features. After that animal painting was basically done, I decided to cover the entire thing with resin, which really made the piece significantly more successful. The gloss definitely enhanced the pigments well and gave a new sense of being ‘caged’ in the form of painting. I’ll definitely try this for my big piece as well. Of course, I had some difficulty in spreading the resin over the wood evenly, but this also created bubbles and uneven dents, which added to the piece in the end. All in all, I’m glad I did this long piece before the final big one since I got to experiment with pigments and resin.