Both wings are finished for the most part, though I may come back and tweak them just a little after the sky is painted.  At his point, the study has served its main purpose: to work out details of the wings and their lighting.  In the final painting I wil be increasing the wingspan by about 20 percent, and maybe adjusting their patterning just slightly, but other than that they’re basically ready to go.  The other element that will change a bit is the wee toga.  I will most likely have to set up some sort of reference for it to get the drapery just right for the larger painting.  I’m also still debating whether or not to get rid of the trailing pieceof fabric.

Now to come up with some sort of simple background for this study to place Icarus at his landing site rather than just taking off.

Okay.  So the whole point of this Icarus study was to get a chance to work out the weird little details of the wings, for which I have only the most rudimentary scrap and certainly none taken in the same light as the figure.  The last few days I have been working on roughing in the left wing.  It’s not perfect yet, but I think its getting close.  Here’s what I came up with:

The basic pattern is modeled after a red tail hawk wing.  Why a raptor?  Why not a huge bird like a condor?  Symbolically I don’t want to represent Icarus as a victim or as an opportunist.  And for you ornothologists out there, yes, I realize no living bird ever had primary leading edge feathers that big.  Fortunately I am painting a myth and not an event from real-word history.  Same goes for all you physicists.  Yes, the wings are far to small to carry the weight of the figure, and yes, no human could ever power their own flight with their own upper body musculature.  Again…myth…not science.  I hope it looks good enough to make up for it.  Incidentally, the thumb-like feather will be removed.  It just looks a little too organic for a set of man-made wings, even if they are constructed out of actual feathers and modeled on actual bird wings.

I am planning on blocking in the right wing to the same level of completion, and maybe even chopping in a rough background before taking this further.

In the month or two since ‘Muse and Medium’ was finished I’ve been keeping busy with other little projects.  There was a tiny, wee commission, a brief foray into still-life land (image coming at the end of the post…stay tuned), and the odd sketch.  What I’m most excited about, however, is the study I am currently working on for a painting of Icarus

Again, this is just a single figure study.  I have great scrap of the model, who I met in NY while attending the Grand Central Academy’s summer Intensive.  However, we shot the scrap on the fly, sort of commandeering the GCA’s figure drawing studio and I had no time to mock up even the crudest stand in for the wings.  So, I’ll work out their details here.  The design, the coloring and the lighting.  Below is the sketch I made from several of the reference photos with a rough mechanical take on the wings drawn in.  I used an oil transfer to get the drawing onto the canvas, and a couple of weeks later I have the figure painted (as seen above) and am ready for the challenge of the wings.   Really, I’m posting this one just as I’m getting to the good part… so you haven’t missed anything.  Other than the part where I completely obliterated my first charcoal transfer of the drawing with an oil wash.  All the more reason to get this whole oil transfer technology mastered.

This drawing isn’t completely perfect, and neither is the design of the wings.  Both are close enough, however, for the work on the lighting, colors and details of the wings to translate easily to the final painting.  I actually think this study will make a nice little piece on it’s own…once I throw in a simple background.  We’ll see.

Hello, old friend.  I haven’t seen you in a while.

It’s been a busy summer.  Sara is deep in thesis land, we’ve got one child trying to learn to walk, and one just starting kindergarten.  Unfortunately, the blog got away from us for a while.  Yes, I am the consummate neglectful host, but I’m back, baby…and I got you something:  It’s a professional photo of the latest painting, finally finished after almost four months of work.

When last we left this project, I was just about to begin working on the sculpture.  Sara surmised that it may end up being one of the trickier parts of the painting, since my scrap for everything else was so good, and I have a hard time letting go of details in my reference material.  In fact, it was a great deal more difficult than I had imagined to change skin into clay, (let alone curly, brunette hair into clay) and I ended up repainting several areas multiple times in an attempt to get the thing to read as a sculpture of a girl instead of a girl wearing gray-green body paint.  And then there was a moment of Bob Ross-ian bravery test as I brushed clay colored paint over my carefully rendered plywood plinth to give the appearance of clay having been cleaned up around the feet.  It all worked out well enough in the end, I think.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present ‘Muse and Medium’.