Preparation

While winding down the most recent painting, I've simultaneously been getting some preliminary work done on three new ones.

On Friday, Jude and I went to Golden Gate Park. I brought Freidrich's skull, in order to take a reference photo of the jawless skull laying in grass. I wanted the grass to have an unkept wild look, so the park was the obvious place to go. However, on looking at the photo (above) I decided that the grass in front of the skull would have to be a little bit shorter. This is the skull that will have python babies hatching out of the cranium. So I don't want the snakes in the foreground to get totally lost in overly long blades of grass.

This weekend, I developed a finished drawing of a skull with wrestling lizards. Before finalizing the drawing, I again watched a dvd that I recorded of fighting monitor lizards televised on Nat Geo. The drawing of the lizards above is idealized - the lizards on the dvd footage were never as clearly defined, nor as perfectly posed as I desired. This is very typical - I review internet images, television programs, and books to study the various animals in my paintings. In the end, the final image that I draw is a composite from many different sources.

For the lizards above, I also made some very simple clay lizard figures to help figure out shadows and other relationships. Very crude but it did the trick.