The Making of “Drone of Clouds and Minds” - Time-lapse Painting
Here is a link to the video of the making of my last painting.
When I publish my paintings, I always feel the urge to write and explain how and why I went down the path I did with the creation process. Most social medias don’t give you that opportunity though. Also, sadly, most people run around and are so busy these days that I just cant see myself intriguing anyone to sit down and read a piece of writing. No matter if it takes just 5 or 10 minutes, sometimes even less.
Also, building a following is hard and I don’t know if this is the place where people are interested in the insights of a struggling artist. But anyways, here it goes (if you like what I say and would like to see it integrated in the video next time, do say so please).
I had an University Drawing assignments calling for the creation of a character. Well no, this here is not the character that I created for Uni. What I handed in was a half-assed magician with a robe and very broad shoulders. But one of the initial ideas I had with him was: I wanted him to hold a magical fire. And I wanted it to be something interesting, something novel. So I said, why not follow some mathematical shapes? Maybe he is a wizard that knows every secret of the world? And he resides in a world, where, though predominantly fantastical, science still exists. Who knows, if they had a scientist good enough, he could probably formulate magic itself too.
That’s why I said - well, his fire will have a three dimensional shape that is a bit more unorthodox. He will be holding a fire that is an polyhedron. Maybe icosahedron? 20 faces. That didn’t matter at the time. I even wanted it more abstract.
Some polyhedrons can be seen above. I especially liked the one numbered 8.
This concept stuck with me, but I wanted to explore it in a personal painting, and not something related to University. Here came another idea, one that I had circling in my mind for the prior 4-5 months. A portrait of a woman looking directly into an abstract shape. And so this sketch was born:
You can see how it started loosing its mathematical concept and went more into an abstraction. The days that followed though, I had doubts whether I want to be exploring something as abstract or not.
In Diablo 3, the Wizard had some incredible held in off-hand sources and orbs. And although its been very long since I last played, I think that some of the electric colors and interesting shapes had an influence on me too.
One of the off-hands in Diablo 3. While painting I didn’t use any of this as a reference, but I believe tha game had left a mark on my mind.
Call me cynical, but a lot of art circles around and becomes famous for just being a tiny bit abstract but immensely pretty. There is nothing wrong with it, but I just think people are prone to easily liking stuff that is just pretty. Sometimes there even isn’t any deeper meaning into it. I wanted a beautiful painting (for a change in my ordinary monstrous portfolio) but I wanted more than that into it. So I started exploring the idea of a robot. Or a drone.
One of the first sketches of the drone. It ended up looking totally different, but you can see the starting points and similarities.
But all of that you can see in the video itself. Also, this blog post already stretched to be a bit too lengthy, so I will leave the rest of the insights for the video itself.
As always, you can follow my art at Artstation, Facebook, or follow me here and at Twitter.
Hope you found this post interesting, Pete.
