Friday 14 September 2012

Stephen

After an awful lot of umm-ing and aaah-ing, I've decided to put one of my very favourite pieces up for sale.  Meet Stephen- the only one of my creations to ever give me actual nightmares until I got him out onto paper. I never knew you could be nagged by your own imaginings....if that's what he is of course :)


 He's worked as usual in charcoal pencil on watercolour paper but in this case, most of the hours went into working out how on earth he was put together in the first place. Sometimes I get an idea that comes through in such a very definite way that there is no arguing with it so it was more of an engineering project than anything.


He's named for the Alice Cooper track of the same name which I happened to be listening to when he first crept around the corner. That'll teach me.... To begin with all I had was the impression of something that had maybe once been a person but had become something else. Oh, and a lot of arms.


He has two sets of walking arms facing forward and two back but with an additional limb section so one of my first tasks was figuring out which joints went where and modifying bits as needed. I spent many days on good old google for that !


Then, it was choosing a position for that first drawing. I always do one of just the thing itself so I have everything clear in my head. Soon I hope to be keeping you all amused with pictures of him out and about. Are your windows shut by the way? :)


Just to give you an idea of the lengths I had to go to to get that one picture, here's a shot of my sketchbook page with the bones in each arm marked out and numbered to make sure I didn't get anything on backward. Possibly the most fascinating bit of Stephen is his face but as I already have a portrait of him I'll get into that in my next post along with a bit more about our new friends' habits....

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