Posted 3 months ago with 5 notesSession I, Project 3. Dinosaur
sin space.References were just pictures of stegosauruses and outer space that Google showed me. This also helped.
This went well. The project had focus once I decided that one dinosaur was better than lots. Learning from the last project/disaster, I went with a larger canvas and didn’t bother transferring my small sketch to it before I started painting. I took my time, patiently let the paint dry in layers, and worked background to foreground, for the most part. To be honest, I think this might be the best painting I’ve ever made—not necessarily in terms of skill or technique or even subject matter (but we’ll get to that in a second), so much as in method. It only took me twenty-four years to figure this out.
Painting from a sketch was just great. (I even made a second, more detailed sketch of stegz, to make the process of painting him as smooth as I could.) If I had done it otherwise, I might have wound up with a series of planets instead of the clouds. The planets still made it in there, as a last-minute decision that I think helps pull it together.
What did I really like about this project? I recently realized that stegosaurus suffered my underappreciation when I was a kid, and now that I’m an adult, I have really quite fallen for this great beast. Also, the space clouds, which I painted first, I loved so much I was a little sad to have to add stegosaurus at all. Those space clouds are closest to the ideas, shapes, and shading that I’m personally interested in. I was very happy with how they came out (I swear that my rather energetic, slightly grungy playlist is responsible). Only now, thinking about it, do I wish I had had stegz emerging from them—alas, I’ll have to live with cloudy burst from his jetpack. Which, by the way, nearly didn’t make it into the picture. (I’m glad that it did.)
I could have done with a slightly taller canvas, for the sake of the composition, but on the whole I think it looks OK. The colors are OK, too. I struggled with his brilliant green complexion, and decided dappling some pale yellow-green on there would help (I had to do a lot of revision of that dappling before I was pleased with the look). I also (yet again) struggled with shading. In the end, the kind of flat shadows on stegz work fine enough for me. How do I feel about his green and blue body against the (my roommates called it) active background of space? Uh. More and more, I wish I had gone with earthier, tanner tones, and maybe horizontal brown stripes on his plates. At the same time, the colors make him more of a character.
The project took just a touch over three weeks, and at no point did I feel rushed (except the beginning, of course, when I had to push myself to start). The good pacing meant that I was able to handle details I sometimes neglect, e.g., painting the edges a dark blue to add to the depth of the painting as an object.
