This weekend I will be the Artist Guest of Honor at DemiCon 29 in Des Moines, IA May 4-6, 2018). One of the events I’ll be doing is an oil painting demo and since their convention theme this year is Down the Rabbit Hole, I’ve created an Alice in Wonderland themed composition. I’ve started the lay-in at home so I can paint the more interesting bits during the demo. I will be using Gamblin’s Solvent-Free Fluid which is a safflower-alkyd painting medium.

The Making of Alice, Quite Mad (working title).

I thought I’d share some of the process for creating this picture. This particular idea started with these little sketches.

Once I figured out the basics of what I wanted I did some exploration in a rough sketch with some value. I experimented with the interaction between Alice and the Cheshire Cat. I wanted it to seem like she considers all the odd things going on around her to be completely normal. She’s just petting the dear little cat and there’s nothing out of the ordinary about any of it.

Reference! I hired a model who is great at getting into character. We used a stunt pig in place of the cat (Pierre Pig, a Manhattan Toy animal, has a particular flop about his form that I like quite a bit). I placed the mode in my rough sketch with some value to see how it would work. At this point I was still considering including a nod to “The Matrix” and “Inception” since they’re both  stories of altered perception to fit the convention theme.

To further develop the picture I drew studies and collected reference of Medieval and Renaissance portraits of royalty as well as cats, the rose, a top hat, cards, different faces for the Red Queen’s expression. Then I experimented with inventing different poses for the cat and Alice. At one point I had the cat floating on its back but it created some weird tangents with neighboring shapes and odd negative space so I nixed that idea. I also experimented with tipping the hat over or having it defy gravity to try and create a more unbalanced feel.

For the queen’s facial expression, I needed to decide on what attitude she had. Was she just about to explode with anger? Was she screaming at the top of her lungs? Was she looking at Alice with disdain? Once I decided that I was able to better design the face. I did many studies of various expressions of myself and found reference. Then using those resources I invented a few expressions of different emotions. Here are the 3 options from which I chose the final direction.

I created the drawing and ran it past some other artists. They suggested playing more with the size of the cards, enlarging the nearer ones. I decided I liked the exaggerated sizes quite a bit so Alice seems a more diminutive. I also decided that to balance out the picture and create a more interesting story Alice needed to be on the left so the Queen would look at her.

To use as a guide for the look and feel I’m aiming for, I created a color/value comp in Photoshop. (Sometimes I do color studies in gouache but I needed to experiment more with the color in a short amount of time so digital was the best choice in this situation).

This time around I decided to mount a piece of the Claessens DP13 Belgian linen to gatorfoam. We use this canvas as The Atelier Studio Program of Fine art because it handles well for refined portraits, figure, and still life paintings. I want to see if the double primed linen’s surface is smooth enough to deal with tiny details. This is the first time I’ve mounted canvas to gatorfoam. More on that in another post.

In preparation for the show I’ve done a bit of the lay-in so during the demo I can work on painting some of the more interesting areas. For the lay-in I’m using a little Gamsol Odorless Mineral Spirits and a little of Gamblin’s Solvent-Free Fluid. During the demo I’ll just be using the Solvent-Free Fluid to thin the paint.

See you soon DemiCon!