Earlier this week I was asked by two people if I ever considered creating a piece using an animal as a subject. The thought had occured to me earlier in the project, but the notion dropped out of my head soon after as I got swept up in illustrating humans and their skulls. So it was kindly reminded to me, and I decided to tackle this new image using a horse as the model.

I don’t have any original photos of horses at my disposal, so I had to use some found photography to help out with the piece. Then I had to track down some references for horse skulls and spines which turned into quite the challenge on it’s own. Once I got everything I needed, the real fun started as I tried to draw the contours of an animal skull which made me feel like a fish out of water. I was midway through when I realized I had never attempted to draw a skull other then a homosapien, so it was a neat and challenging ordeal.

I also had a very rough time choosing colors and getting a level of contrast I was happy with. Even now, the piece looks less heavy then the others. This new image is a test piece in preparation to tackle the real thing at some point.

As I continue my work on the skull series I’m constantly thinking about how the style and pieces can be applied to other mediums. I quickly began thinking about cd covers, book covers, magazine designs, clothing, and eventually toys. I have been a longtime fan of the Dunny series created by the mighty Kid Robot. They make killer toys anyway but the Dunny line really spoke to me, mostly because of it’s cute design coupled with great designs by famous artists.

KidRobot commissions artists and designers to create their own version of the Dunny character with a blank sculpt. The artists go bananas creating the toys, then KidRobot has a release party showcasing all of the new colorful designs based on their toy. Pretty genius.

So one hilarious thing led to another and a Signalnoise Dunny was created. It was a challenge to get my style to bang down to a little cartoon, but the final product is rather funny. I had a good time rendering this little guy so now I’m considering throwing together a few more Dunny designs in the future when I need a break from my more serious work.

Here is the new large-format piece, entitled The Warming. I will hopefully get the three new works out for a print test this week to see how accurately the colors will translate, which is pretty crucial given how long I spend picking the right hues. I worked hard on this new piece to keep a level of androgyny about the figure. My previous attempts all have an obvious gender involved, so it was a nice change to bring that element out and leave it to interpretation. There is a detail shot of the skull posted to show a bit of my digital paint at work.

I like choosing colors, but I’ve noticed with these pieces in particular I always tend to lean toward a warm spectrum. I use lots of red, orange and yellow ochre throughout the entire process because it feels pretty natural to me. For that reason I am trying to steer my work away from that color palette to use more greens and blues.

More to come later this week as I’m trying to organize a few more photo shoots.

This is the second large format piece constructed using the previous photoshoot with Sarah. After the initial rendering of the figure and skull was done, I loaded the textures on top and started peeling them away one by one which led to me having a far better understanding of how the colors were being influenced. Oddly enough, most of the textures were deleted before the final image emerged, which makes this piece a bit clearer then the previous.

I was told by a friend that when making music it’s important to put many musical elements on top of one another in order to get a full grasp on how they are effecting one another. Then muting or deleting each level to see which way the composition swings. I tried very hard to keep a similar process with this piece, which led to the image shifting drastically a few times. The piece was green at one point, and a mistake made me realize orange was the route to go with. Perhaps next time I’ll keep a series of snapshots to show the different steps as the image evolves.

Large print tests will be soon to ensure my colors are being translated properly to paper. This will be done next week, as well as a hopeful second photo shoot with an established model here in Halifax.

It was always my intention to allow this project to gain its own momentum and girth as I proceeded with my trial and error tactics. I tried a lot of different processes over the past few weeks (documented on my Flickr stream) as I tried to forge my own imagery using the tools I’ve been using for years. I started as mere sketches and continued to layer on more detail as I went on.

Last week I decided it was time to up the ante a bit, so I organized a photo shoot with my friend Sarah who was nice enough to allow me to use her silhouette in my new works. It was nothing advanced, simply my Canon Powershot camera on a tripod set up in my living room with normal lighting but it really allowed me the freedom to capture just the right shapes I was looking for. The warm-up composites were mostly found poses, but now I had the ability to really nail what I wanted visually.

As I started using her images, I quickly realized the difference in quality and it reduced the amount of headaches I experienced by using shots by other people who obviously didn’t have my kind of artwork in mind when they took the shots. This new composite, which I guess would be stage three, was designed at 24″ by 36″ and I will be sending it to be printed this week sometime to test color values and texture qualities.