Climbing Out

As I've been creating more faces for my gallery show next summer at Fuller Lodge Art Center, I've been going through many photos from my stash (it's also been an excellent chance to get rid of lots of really bad ones!). I love the facial expression on this guy's face and the perspective was very intriguing– he was climbing out of a hole in some rocks, likely in Wyoming or Colorado, though time does funny things to the clarity of memories...

Climbing Out (Color). Watercolor. 4" x 4" 2015

I cropped the original photo quite a bit and did several prep sketches to decide how exactly I wanted to go about the presentation since the photo wasn't really good enough to try to capture any realism (and who wants to do that all the time anyway?). I chose to go bold and bright, with shadows reduced to graphic shapes.

Behind the Scenes of Climbing Out (Color)

I really enjoyed having to think differently about this one, and about how best to get a sense of depth with a limited palette and shading. And it led to the next face (next week!).