March Production Notes

While February was filled with sculpting, painting, editing and planning, March will be filled with creating environments. The original idea was to photograph the character sculptures in nature. A live environment.

Here are several reasons why I have chosen to "rethink" that idea:

1) having to wait a few months for things to green up here in WI

2) properly scaling objects in proportion to the characters

3) lighting can be very difficult to control

My next idea was to create digital backgrounds and then photograph the characters and clip out the characters and place them (digitally) into their digital environment. While there will be some final digital manipulation, I feel that crafting the entire thing on the computer will compromise the consistency of my style AND take some of the fun out of it!

My third idea was to still create the backgrounds digitally, but then print the backgrounds out (large scale) and photograph the characters physically on those backgrounds. This could still work but the tricky part would still be keeping my painting style looking consistent. In the end I will probably wind up combining a few of these ideas to make it all work.

So Monday, as I was swirling with all of with this, I simply sat down at my work table and had the urge to just start painting right on it. So I did. The result was exactly what I needed to experience. In less than an hour I had hand crafted the beginning of what will be Bezert's woods and Lake Blugg's Bog. It was very satisfying to produce some tangible results and get my hands dirty and at the same time. Sigh. I really had to listen hard for that one. I still plan on creating some of the work digitally, but probably closer to the final photo editing stages. Here is a little peek at where things currently stand... and Miette.

Yesterday I created a few tree props from 1/16" pine board left over from a previous project. I am feeling much better about this process and as you can see, Miette clearly thinks I am creating this entirely for her. I have to say, she does look pretty sassy-cute sharing Bezert's woods.