While I was online this morning, I did a little surfing around the gallery on the Montana Skatepark Association site from On Deck V (last year’s), and I got an unexpected punch in the gut. One of the decks from last year was painted and doodled similarly to what I had planned on doing on mine.
Ouch.
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| This one isn’t happening. |
I sort of had to take a step back to square one, but not so much. I had an idea of what I wanted to do from the beginning, but then got sidetracked when I saw my sketchbook page with all the doodles. I get sidetracked easily. I could still use that very first idea as a backup, even though I hadn’t done any sketches for it.
So I went back to the studio this afternoon, sanded the wood fill down from yesterday, and started coating the board with gesso. While the first coat was drying, I played with some new color mixtures for a background. When I first thought about this idea, I couldn’t see it with any other background other than purple. Not sure why. I don’t really use purple, but there you go.
The new mixtures are a combination of Ultramarine Blue, Alizarin Crimson, Payne’s Gray (which is bluer and grayer than the swatch in the link shows), Utrecht Unbleached Titanium (different than Liquitex) and Titanium White.
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| I’ll be painting the little guy on the bottom left, with a replacement foot from the sketch to the right. |
While the second coat of gesso was drying I started playing with some sketches of that original idea. At first I was going to do the skeleton version (on the upper right), but I played around with the little guy on the bottom left, and now have decided to use him for my final painting.
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| Three coats of gesso, and it’s ready to paint. |
One more coat of gesso, and I’m as far as I can go until it’s dry.