May 20th, 2010 - Working on the Triptych

So today started off a bit rocky, in fact today is the perfect reason why you do your morning sketches first before anything else! Your day is won or lost by the way you start your morning out. For me it started with a bad McDonald's coffee that was burnt and their employee cussing up a storm, way too much for morning time for me.

So after sitting down and breathing a little bit I started out drawing a few gesture sketches for a potential Gorilla painting - now this painting won't take place overnight and really no painting of considerable worth is just done over night. So may disagree but I believe that even the ones that do happen overnight is really a product of our past experiences that build up over time and - like a glass with too much water being poured into it - it just comes out. Yet it takes something significant to make that spark happen - for me with this gorilla painting I am searching for that spark and the best way to find it is by sketching:


A gesture sketch is one of the most powerful ways to really get into the "essence" of an object. You essentially move your pen in the direction your mind, your body and spirit tell you to. You just go with it. Don't worry about accuracy or about "how real" it looks just worry about recording what you see and feel. Judging by the lines I made in this sketch I feel that I am attracted to the muscular build of these animals and I think that is something that I will be focusing a lot of attention on. This attraction to the muscle structure of animals really show through in a lot of my horse paintings and in fact that next sketch I did was in reference to that:
This drawing (in pen - as always) is a nice and I feel an attraction to the muscle structure here as well. I like the movement and power of the horses and who would I be if I didn't give proper attention to this? It's just doing what's right. I think that by show casing their muscles and powerful movement is a tribute to who they are and I it is important to show that!

So, I think this drawing of the horse is definitely going to be in the Triptych that I built last night. Using three 2ft x 4ft panels I started looking at what must go on there, patience is the key here...this is going to be a long thought out process! And if you think this is long just wait until the colors come into play!