{"id":1605,"date":"2010-01-30T22:09:18","date_gmt":"2010-01-31T06:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/?p=1605"},"modified":"2010-01-30T22:42:50","modified_gmt":"2010-01-31T06:42:50","slug":"an-owl-without-a-tootsie-pop-is-like-jesus-without-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/?p=1605","title":{"rendered":"An Owl without a Tootsie Pop is like Jesus without a…."},"content":{"rendered":"

It started off with a sketch.<\/p>\n

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Which became another sketch.<\/p>\n

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Which gave me something to do with that horrible monstrosity:<\/p>\n

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I considered painting over this- but I decided to take a different route.\u00a0 A route that I hadn’t travelled since college.\u00a0 I decided to glue paper to the canvas and create an unconventional painting surface.\u00a0 Since originally the guy in my sketches looked like Jesus, and the painting was going to symbolize various things (I won’t go into it, but you can look up the meanings for owls in the bible and all of that nonsense on your own if you like) I decided to make the paper fit the subject matter.\u00a0 So, I spent a whole night tearing out pages from\u00a0The History of the\u00a0Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints\u00a0and cementing them to the canvas.\u00a0 It was meant to be… as the book had a perfect number of pages to cover every inch of the canvas with none left over.<\/p>\n

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Wow, that is one shitty looking Owl, huh?<\/p>\n

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Okay, we’re now a little better.\u00a0 The owl’s body looks like it was based on a cat’s though -so this is no good.\u00a0 I should mention that at this point I was still eyeballing and gridding everything, so proportions were constantly fudged. Hey, I know… how about if I add some flames!\u00a0 Yeah, that’ll fix that owl!………<\/p>\n

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Um, no.\u00a0 No, that won’t work, stupid…\u00a0 How about you step back and study Owl anatomy a little more and start over (but I liked the owl’s face!)….<\/p>\n

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So, as you can see above I took a day or two and did some serious owl anatomy studying.\u00a0 Much improved from before, right?\u00a0 Count the feathers in the wings, there should even be the right amount of feathers now!<\/p>\n

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Once the bird started progressing I decided to work on the human.\u00a0 I decided to make him a Native American since he was starting to look more and more like one.\u00a0 I liked how the paint looked on the rough paper.\u00a0 The features on the face look distorted.\u00a0 In the photo above you can get a sense of how I work on these large canvases, I get right up in there.\u00a0\u00a0 What that also means is that I lose perspective and body parts can become distorted.\u00a0 I don’t notice until I step way back.\u00a0 However, I decided to keep the face distorted, because the rest of the piece was heading in that direction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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I had a devil of a time trying to figure out what the background would\/should be like in this piece.\u00a0 It changed as I went along.<\/p>\n

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Eventually I settled with some crazy mountains in the background and bushes\/brambles in the foreground.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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This piece ended up looking really strange.\u00a0 There are many elements I like – but none of them seem to fit together very well.\u00a0 Even the hair, which I’ve done successfully in the past, looks bizarre; like some kind of black waterfall cascading over rocks.\u00a0 I was also unsure what to do about the bird’s smaller wing, which appears much lighter in color.\u00a0 I decided to leave it that way as the sun could be shining through and change the color.\u00a0 Some nice elements that you can’t see via photograph are the tiny details in the brambles and how the underlying paper and thinner layer of paint makes the man’s skin seem more thin and luminous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It started off with a sketch. Which became another sketch. Which gave me something to do with that horrible monstrosity: I considered painting over this- but I decided to take a different route.\u00a0 A route that I hadn’t travelled since college.\u00a0 I decided to glue paper to the canvas and create an unconventional painting surface.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1605"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1613,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605\/revisions\/1613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}