MUTINY

This was, I believe, the first project I finished after finishing my 8-month grad project. It certainly summed up my feelings from that period. I wanted to experiment with more unique coloring, as well as cloth and motion. Plus I wanted to experiment with mechanical arms.

The pose specifically is something I had wanted to do for at least 3 months, something from a lower angle, at a character who was in a falling pose. Its an unusual situation that I’d never tried before, forcing me to make use of some spacial visualization skills I rarely make use of in a normal portrait. The movement also forced me to get more experimental with shapes. I chose to use comic-like motion lines, as if the colors were bleeding off of the objects.

My choice was also to keep the hand and ship solid and in focus. It brings the viewer directly to the hand first, and the bright colors in the ship drive the eye both up towards it, and down the arm to the rest of the body, supported by the legs making an almost half-circle downwards. These are compositional choices I rarely ever make, but drawing the viewers’ eye around the piece with strategically placed values and shocks of color is a thing I find fascinating, both noting it in paintings, and practicing it for myself.

This piece taught me some of my knee-jerk reactions to posing and composition. I also do feel like I learned a lot from it, and I do want to make more paintings that push me in the ways this one did.