Thursday Art Walk 4

Since I posted the watercolor last week, I decided to go ahead and grab an old school project of mine to put up. When I was in college, wasting money I didn't have on an education that didn't seem to go anywhere, I had a few art classes. The best ones were the watercolor classes, but I enjoyed my other classes, too. This piece was from one of the other classes.

It's supposed to be one of the castle cities from the video game Secret of Mana, but from the side and at night. We were given a square of plywood or chipboard or something like that and a bucket of spackle and told to make some kind of relief. It was a lot of fun mounding it up and building support structures under the spackle. The painting was the hard part - since it takes so long for the spackle to dry, and since it cracks (a lot, if you're not careful), then the painting can take just as long, since you have to seal the spackle with a base coat (white), then lay your under-colors (black), and if your under color is too dark, then it takes forever to build up your over-colors. Then comes highlighting...

I'm most pleased with the water. That effect was both the most fun and the most fussy. I remember getting the spackle down and then looking at my hand, thinking "I wonder how this feels on my palm". I ran a hand across it and the waves seemed to just... appear. The perfect swirls and peaks were a joy to make. Painting them was a big old pain, though. You can see where I had trouble highlighting some of the shallower waves (the big white streak in the middle), but it was still really cool.

I'd love to do another relief like this some day. Now that I'm not a teenager anymore, I bet I could do better. It's probably been about a decade since I made that, now that I think about it...

Go out there and create something you enjoy, friends.
FC