It has been a long time since I did any acrylic painting. Well, being a bit of an opportunist, I was lucky enough to have a gap between commissions whilst waiting for client feedback so I got out the brushes and paints and got to it... but, what to paint!? I looked at all my books and magazines and started pulling them out, leafing through them, attaching little page notes to pages with pieces that took my interest and started to hunt for that elusive spark of inspiration.
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| The growing piles of books and magazines on the living room floor and the startings of some little sketches. |
I went through a great deal of them, pouring over photographs of trees, paintings by Tom Kidd, Alex Pardee and Chet Zar (and many more inside the Spectrum Annuals and magazines I have) and looked through many workshop books. I looked through some of my old note pads and sketch books and discovered I had ideas for pieces I had yet to flesh out. With all this visual input, the ideas began to flow (new and somehow old...although that isn't totally possible) and I sketched some of them out onto a few small pages.
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| Here are some of the sketches I produced that evening. |
A few days prior to this, I had prepared some acrylic paper. I had trimmed them down to fit in some frames and had put them to one side but I had kept the trimmings. Using these small rectangle pieces, I created 4 bookmarks.
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| Done with Acrylics these are just over 3cm wide and 18cm tall. |
From left to right:
Tree: This piece was a tester for adding a hint of texture to the bark of the tree. You can't really see it here but I painted little curved, horizontal light lines to give shape to the vertical ridges of bark. It's something I picked up from my time spent Daily Doodling.
Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde: To the pop-savy of you, you will know who these little guys are. That's right! The Ghosts in the Pac Man Game! I think I may develop these guys into bigger paintings with more details really soon.
Lion: Well, it sort of looks lika a lion but a really dumb looking magic lion... possibly the inbreed cousin of Aslan from Narnia.
Book Worm: Obvious... no?
Revisiting an old note pad, I saw that I had originally wanted to do a take on that classic Che Guevara poster by Jim Fitzpatric but with a monster edge. For what ever reason, I thought it'd be fun to do the hunter creature from the Predator films in this style and quickly fleshed out a rough. I then transferred the image to a bigger piece of card.
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| Pre Guevara, Acrylic on Paper. 9" x 12" |
That concluded this burst of work and my, was my living room in a bit of a mess. I'm glad my girl friend Claire is the sort of person who is cool with temporary disarray. Here is what the floor looked like for about 3 days...
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| What a mess, by Lloyd Harvey. |
It feels good to start painting again.
Lloyd Harvey
