The creative process was like putting a puzzle together. 

The creative process for this piece involved using multiple snapshots taken from different angles.  I ended up uploading some of the images into photoshop, flipping them horizontally.  Then, I had to remember that the light was coming from the opposite direction.  In other words, lots of switching gears in my mind!

The commission is for a very sweet family. I am helping them capture memories from one of their favorite hangouts here in the Quad Cities. They love kayaking back in the calm waters of Sylvan Slough in the Mississippi River, and playing on the beach there. I was amazed by how thoughtful they are. They plan to hang it in their home until their daughter grows up, and give it to her when she moves into her first home. It will be the first piece of original art she will own. Their daughter is in preschool!

Meet the Family

Their daughter loves to hunt for shells and mollusks on the beach, but they did not have an action shot of her doing this activity.  I decided to do some research about mollusks in our area, and found a video of a young field researcher looking for mollusks in the river.  So, I was able to pause the video when she was in the position I liked, and then I was able to model the position of their daughter after the field researcher.  And learned quite a bit about mollusks in the process!

Different Photos Used for Different Parts of the Painting:

1. The beach
2. The boy...in the photo, he was flipped the other way, and the sun was coming from the opposite direction!
3. The girl, from several photos for her face, and the YouTube video mentioned earlier
4. The green kayak...from a photo of it out on the water in a place in Florida with a completely different person in it!
5. The mom: based on the position of the person in the original photo of the green kayak, but also from 3 or 4 pics that I had taken of her from a different kayaking event back in 2013 or so, and some close up pics she gave me from her family Christmas photos.
6. The dad, based on a picture that the mom took of him from her kayak over to his from another outing.
7. The orange kayak, roughly based on the position it was in from the first photo that the beach is based on.  
8. Are you confused yet?  My mind was doing lots of flips! All in all, I would say I probably worked from about 20 different images to compose this piece.  Like I said before, it was like putting a puzzle together!  I feel a huge sense of accomplishment now that it's nearly finished.

Watch the video above to view the nearly completed painting.

The Most Interesting Tidbit I Learned During This Project...was that even when you are trying to not have highly detailed faces, just the slightest nudge of a pixel of paint (we're talking a pinhead sized area), can totally change the expression of a person. That was the most challenging part of the process.  

One minute, I would be feeling like things were going great, and the next, the person would look like either a zombie, or really angry, or like a deer caught in headlights!  I also re-learned, that it's much easier to create shadows from hats on faces after you let the under layers of paint dry a bit.  I wanted to try to push through, and not wait, and ended up creating more work fixing the mistakes I made from not waiting!  The ultimate question...will I remember these lessons learned until the next commission?  Time will tell!