Skull Girl

I had quite the obsession for a few months of an idea of a woman in a lovely dress with an animal skull sort of serving as a mask.  It took me a while to realize it, but I think the idea came from the ballroom scene from the movie Labyrinth.  It's my favorite movie and I've seen it way too many times, so I can see why this idea was so firmly lodged in my subconscious.

This one took so much reference photo research, I kind of don't want to talk about it.  There are also several photo-shopped versions of other women and other skulls that just weren't quite right.  Ultimately I settled on this combination because it presented the least amount of problems where lighting was concerned.  Ideally, I'd just like to have a collection of animal skulls and take these kinds of reference pictures myself, but I don't hunt, nor do I have the kind of money to just buy animal skulls online whenever I want.

This image isn't ideal because I was imagining a more feminine dress and just more of the woman shown, but I'm a bit of a slave to my reference photos and don't like to invent anything if I can help it.  I wanted the colors to give a cold, austere kind of mood, which I think it mostly does, but it is rather monochromatic.  The paper I used was a higher grade, but it still couldn't take quite the beating I'm used to doling out on cold press, so the background's a little streaky.  Ultimately I do like this painting if I just appreciate it for what it is, rather than comparing it to what I had originally intended.  It seems like my resources end up making a lot of my creative decisions.

Skull!

So I'm kind of in love with skulls and I just really wanted to paint a  no-frills human skull.  I took another swing at being more loose with watercolor and putting wet into wet over masking fluid with the background.  Then after removing the masking fluid, I painted in the actual skull in my normal, anal-retentive way.  This was again using my crappy paper, so after putting so much paint in the background, I actually couldn't remove my masking fluid, so I had to use a wet paint brush to dilute the layers of paint over the masking fluid and sop them up with paper towel.  Not a huge to-do, but still annoying.  This is the last piece I did with my crappy paper, so in case anyone thinks paper quality doesn't matter, take it from me: INVEST IN GOOD PAPER.

So again, not totally successful.  My wet into wet got so saturated that it's kinda hard to tell it IS wet into wet.  And the skull, while not exactly mono-chromatic, still feels local color-esque and not all that dynamic.  It's not a bad skull anatomically, though, and overall the piece is kinda neat looking.

Watercolor on cold press.

Beauty is Pain

I had this idea a few years ago for a school assignment.  I was trying to think of a theme for a series of paintings and I was looking at old make-up and clothing ads.  I wanted to re-create the ads with more sinister elements as a commentary on using fur and animal testing for beauty products.  I ended up not doing the series, but this particular idea stuck in my head, and I decided to paint it in the spring of '12.

I put the original ad underneath as a way to compare and contrast.  The idea for the bladed glove came from Paul Outerbridge's Woman with Claws, which I saw years and years ago.  I remember the website I saw it on referred to the gloves as old meat-packing gloves, but while doing research for this painting, I couldn't find any other references to these gloves as meat-packing gloves, so who knows.

I'm mostly happy with this painting.  The colors aren't quite right, and I had a hard time making the blood convincing, but I'm happy with how close it resembles the original ad.  The paper I was using for this painting wasn't exactly ideal, so there was a bit of puddling and that was a bit frustrating.  I also wish I had done the lips more like how they appear in the ad.  I honestly don't remember why I painted them differently.

Watercolor on cold press.