Earth: Birthday #32

Yes that's right, it's time for the big binarily-significant \(2^5\) birthday! Here on Earth anyway. Now there's just my Mercury birthday to wait for later this month. I don't have much more to say about it—you've heard the song and dance by now—so let's get back to talking about…

…this painting. If you remember from the previous post, I'd tried painting the shading of the slug from a picture, and decided I really didn't like the outcome. I then had the thought that perhaps this was a job for my favorite trick of putting some dimensionality into a painting by extruding it into the third dimension. It's unfortunately a little hard to tell due to the face-on angle of the above photo, but I've painted over the slug's body with some flexible modeling paste mixed with a little yellow paint. I immediately liked where this was going much better, so this'll be the new direction for this painting. I did another painting session adding more modeling paste to the posterior two-thirds of the slug's body, and tried to get a photo from a different angle that would show the topology a bit better:

It's still not the best lighting, but hopefully you can see how I've built up a kind of crest ridge along the back (as the real slugs indeed have). I need to go back over it and even it out with the front a bit, but I'm really enjoying this sort of…reverse-sculpting? The modeling paste is apparently marble dust in acrylic, so it's almost like the reverse of sculpting something out of a block of marble. One tricky aspect of the paste is that it's very plastic and easily retains brush strokes, so it's a very delicate process and when I've got it built out to where I want it I'll have to give it all a layer of paint to smooth it out a bit. Still, I suppose the little imperfections keep it from looking too perfect and give it some character. This photo's from the latest painting session a few days ago, so I'll have to get back to it to have something to show…for my next birthday! A hui hou!