B.A. Portfolio.

This is the ENTIRE body of work I produced for my senior portfolio.

Giant turtle crab thing

I honestly don't know what's going on in this piece. In a lot of ways I this had the same struggles I experienced with the first painting, the one with the cave. I didn't know what to do with it.

Oh, by the way, this painting is based on Fingals Cave in Scotland. I picked this location because of the strange rock formations; Hexagonally aligned basalt columns I believe ( I have know idea what I'm talking about ). This bit of landsacpe reminded me of the works of H.P. Lovecraft, a horror writer who loved the impossible. Lovecraft had a love for strange locations and impossible creatures, some of which lie deep within the ocean. This cave reminded of something out of Cthulhu.

The whole point of this series was to explore methods of painting that I had not used before. I chose to do this by exploring strange landscapes and recontextualizing them not just through the application of paint but with the inclusion of  mysterious beasts.

This painting, like the last one, became more about color relationships than rendering these forms.

As for the creature, I think one of my inspirations here is Fumito Ueda, who is actually a video game designer. In one of his games, Shadow of the Colossus, he depicts theses massive colossi who look as if they are made from the earth itself. Ueda himself was inspired by surrealist art.

I wanted the creature to look well hidden within the mountains and the trees despite its massive size.

Raaawr!

Okay, this is my final stopping point for this piece. Throughout this piece I struggled with the approach; I didn't know if I should go for a more realistic look or a stylized one. As you can see the final result is quite illustrative as I began to focus more on bringing out the color as opposed to rendering them realistically.

The monster in this piece is very much a hybrid of various mammalian creatures.  I'm happy with the expression and how it looks coming out from the cave. It feels very primal, like you stumbled on the den of a wolf or bear and it clearly doesn't like you.