References!

Here are the three compositions that I've created so far. All the photos I've used are taken from flickr (cc) and should be fair use.

Onwards!

Blogs are hard. I'm not good at maintaining them and I never quite know what to say. Since this is for an assignment/class related thingy the pressure is extra on to make clever or insightful posts... which I'm not awesome at. But here goes my best effort.

In the interest of keeping myself on task and keeping an open discourse for the people I will inevitably share this blog with, my proposal is thus:

During the course of this term, it is my intention to complete between 4 and 6 figurative paintings based on characters from a graphic novel that I'm developing. I have three compositions already arranged to my liking and two or three more that I would like to add depending on my productivity.

The overall theme for the paintings will be "Piano no Mori" which means something like "The Piano Forest" and refers to a graphic novel where a boy learns to play piano on one that was abandoned in the woods behind his house. The main characters are all musicians and I would like to have them playing their instruments in some kind of "fantasy" woodland setting. I don't mean fantasy in the Tolkein sense but just in terms that they're in a setting that isn't logical for what they're doing. Ideally, these will be portraits with only one or two characters per piece and their arrangement both within the composition and within the series should say something about how they relate personally. They are all friends but have different ties to one another which, I hope, will be evident.

The boards I'm painting on are all 24"x30", which seemed like a good compromise between too large and too small. None of them have borders at the moment but I will probably add some kind of cradle before I get too far along because I do eventually intend to show them.

For research, I will probably start with the usual suspects --the pre-raphaelites, in my case -- and work from there. Some of my photo browsing has already crossed paths with John Singer Sargent, who I also really enjoy. I recognize, of course, that I will eventually need to move beyond painters I'm already familiar with. I'm happy to take suggestions of other artists who may work in a similar style or use similar themes, particularly if they are more contemporary.