Surf's Up: Kristine's entry for Work of Art Challenge #2

First, the bad news... Emily's art project for Work of Art Challenge #2 is delayed. There definitely is a difference between reality TV shows and real life... they only have their show to worry about. We have work and all sorts of other things. Don't be too hard on Emily; she's getting her wisdom teeth pulled tomorrow! She's promised to submit her final project by Wednesday evening. Good thing we make our own rules!

In the meantime, here is my project...

To recap, this week's challenge was to design a piece based on motion, inspired by parkour. It was a team challenge for the Work of Art contestants... since it's just me and Emily, we were on our own.

Here are my before (the photo that served as inspiration) and after pictures:

I decided I wanted to make pixel art. My medium: oil paints. I looked through old pictures I've taken that represent motion, and used Microsoft Paint (sometimes the simplest solution is best!) to resize the main part of the photos to 30 pixels wide. Here are some of the ones I liked:




After much dramatic internal debate, I settled on this surfing picture:


I took this picture back in August 2005, at the East Coast Surfing Championships in Virginia Beach (we were actually there to see Carbon Leaf). I chose this picture because both the surfer and the wave demonstrate movement, and even though surfing isn't parkour, it's something athletic that I can't do. Yet. :)

Now that I'd selected my photo, I prepared my canvas. Using a pencil, I drew my grid:

As you can see, I opted not to use squares. Instead, I took more inspiration from the idea of motion. In sci fi movies, when a spaceship goes into warp speed/FTL, you get this sort of stretching of the image. I recreated that idea, with narrower columns on the left and wider columns on the right. Did it really make much difference in the final painting? Well, no, not really. But hey, I was trying to demonstrate motion!

I then used the pixelated image (26x20 pixels) as a guide, and used oil paints to create my version of the surfer. Here are some pictures of my process. If you're wondering about my painting order, I was trying to go by color themes (reds, then flesh tones, then greens, etc.).





The painting process took FOREVER! I did the big reality show challenge no-no--I chose something that was waaaay overcomplicated. I could have scaled this back a lot (smaller canvas, convert to fewer colors, ...). As you can see, I wasn't even worrying about being all that neat in my painting... still, it took ages. My arm is sore. I do like the finished product, though.

Along the way I discovered that I had accidentally painted a creepy face into one of the boxes:


It's a little bit easier to see the surfer in thumbnail-sized pictures of my process. Here he is, from start to finish: