I made this for Hellbughunter. (The actual picture was too large to fit into the scanner, which was where I went today, to have it scanned by a professional scanner.) It references the game Squirrel Stapler, so if it is a little difficult to explain what's going on, there is no helping that, it's just the nature of a very surreal game. But it was a very interesting picture to work on, and it contained lots of things I enjoy painting: I'm glad I got to paint flesh, I always love the excuse to paint a forest landscape, and I do like some good grotesque imagery.
And, of course, I always approve of doing atrocities for love. <3
The forest looks unusual on purpose. I wanted to keep the strangely regular shapes of the trees in the game, to better transmit the atmosphere.
Side notes and progress pictures under the cut.
Progress pictures:
The first layers of my acrylic paintings don't look particularly... detailed. This is the difference between the second layer (positioning the landscape only) and the third layer (it is starting to take shape). I know the second picture is of really poor quality (I took it with a bad camera), but I still thought it was interesting to see.
I briefly considered making the Goat of the Wood be an immaterial presence manifesting in the foliage of the forest itself. Hellbughunter decided against it in the end, and I painted over it with what you see in the final picture, but I like the idea of a being appearing like that, and will return to it in a different painting with some other entity.
This is how I positioned the inscription: by writing it on masking tape, cutting the tape in notches to curve it, and placing it that way; then I pulled it off letter by letter, and painted each letter in place of where the tape had indicated it should go. As you can see, for taking these photographs I had removed the tape holding the picture to the board. I don't normally remove that before it's completely finished, but this time I thought it was important, so that Hellbughunter could better see where the edges of the painting were, and consequently where I was going to put the inscription in relation to the actual edges of the picture.
Extra side notes:
A tangent first, but I promise it will be relevant. In Hungarian, some common units of measurement are abbreviated to only their prefix. For example, centimetres are usually just called "centi"; no one mistakes that for centilitres, or centigrammes, or anything, we all know "centi" is centimetres, because that's how the word is used. In the same way, "deci" always means decilitres, and so on. And it doesn't bother me when someone says it that way; that's normal. But I myself find it very hard to say that. There is a mental organ in me that protests wildly (only when I myself am saying it) that that's wrong, that's incorrect, that's not specific enough, and that I shouldn't say these words. This causes me to sound unnecessarily formal by using the full name of the measurements all the time.
This is true for me on other accounts as well, this was just a convenient example of the extent it takes.
Writing this post tripped that in me. I tagged this as "dead animal" and as "animal death", because that is what people who need to filter it are going to filter. But there is a mental organ in me that protested so hard against that that I fought with myself for all the time that I was making this picture, knowing that if I get posting permission, I will write this post and tag it that way. Because humans are a species of animal, and I don't tag pictures of dead humans with animal death, and that means it's incorrect of me to use it in other cases. I'm aware that's how the word is used, and words are for communication, but I struggle with this a lot.
Anyway. That was today's installment of Medea being odd.
#cute animals
#lana del rey
#photography
