The Making of Tesselation 2.

Well for my second experiment with my Tesselation style of painting, I drew inspiration from a painting I recently saw by Rick Amor, for the colour pallette, and also the amazing work of Al Neaimi, for his bold colouring and decorative detail work.
So I started with a reference photo – happens to be of me, but it was more for the angle and pose that I chose it, than any other reason.
I changed the colouring in photoshop to roughly the colouring I planned to use in the painting.

Next I converted the photo to negative because my plan was to do the underpainting in nagative so this would ultimately show through as “grout” to define the “tiles” I painted later…So I sketched the outlines onto canvas, then I painted the background this way…

Bit scary, I know…
Then I started painting, or rather stamping on the “tiles” onto the canvas (using cut up pieces of rubber as the stamp). This was very laborious and unsatisfactory, but I persisted with it because I thought it was how I should do it, and that just using a brush would be cheating or something…

It became clear to me that the negative underpainting just wasn’t working. I realised that it just confused the eye, as far as creating a unified tone went. So I tried painting the “grout” in in a tone that matched (light for light, dark for dark) but in contrasting colours. This is definately the way to go. This worked particularly well in creating highlights in the hair…
Then I started thinking about the background. I so love Al Neaimi’s work, I thought I would try something geometric and patterned, to continue the feeling of tiles….
I used letracet tape to give me the sharp edges and angles I needed.

Then the hair. It was around this time I gave up on the idea of stamping. It just wasn’t working (had to paint over every one because it applied the paint too unevenly) and took too long. So I just painted in the grout with a brush, then filled in the spaces with a brush. That is how I’m going to do it from now on…

I was kind of stuck as far as what to do with the hair – what hairstyle I should go with. I thought the way it was was too severe. So I added a pony-tail, or tried to, but to me it looked worryingly mullet-like.

So I photographed the painting and put it into photoshop for some makeover experiments. I tried a number of things, but it was when I tried the long wavy hairstyle that I knew it was what I wanted. So I painted in all the extra hair.
Many hours and a very sore neck later, here it is…

• Favorite
• Report Concern
• Share This
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Add your comment

You need to login or signup to add your comment to this work.

Tags:

godimawanker, painting and techniques