Surreal

A surreal painting was one I thought would be really fun to do. some of my artwork can be quite strange already, however this gave me the opportunity to mess around with a few known conventions.

I started thinking of some my favorite pieces of surreal artwork that I used to look at a while back. then I started thinking of something that popped into my mind once whilst I was trying to get to sleep. So I ended up with the idea of a giant egg with the yolk becoming a reflection (from Dali's painting) and three white and pink rams playing the violin whilst doing the Kan Kan (from my head).

I had gathered images of art work from Salvador Dali, Geogia O'Keffe and different references for what I was going to draw.

Then from some music I listen to came the idea of something swimming in smoke from a burning bridge (Linkin Park - Burning in he skies), so I decided to turn this into something more literal.

Mood Board, containing sketches and images of what inspired me.

I ended up working through a few compositions, some of them where too chaotic (going for a level design feel) as there were too many surreal ideas thrown all over the place.

I decided to temporarily remove a few of the surreal ideas and focus more on composition. I soon ended up with a nice composition, which then allowed me to bring some of the ideas back in without it feeling too cluttered.

I then started to sketch and design different aspects of the painting (in mood board), so when I get to adding them in later on they can look accurate and won't be a pain to draw.

I also created the egg in Maya to put the lighting I wanted on it, using a white blinn material and an ambient light, I could then use this to have the lighting in the exact right place in the painting.

My final painting was pretty crazy, I put in quite a few surreal ideas, some subtle and some more noticeable. However there are things about it that don't quite look right which you might not notice right away. I played with lighting, I also added three main circles and played with the idea of what a circle can represent (one of them represent 3 things). 

I also played with lighting on the egg, it is being lit up from the same source, but further into the foreground. I had a burning bridge with smoke, the things swimming/flying around the smoke are based on kites of sting rays. 

A few happy accident came my way. One was the ram near the yolk looking like it was emerging out of the yolk, however the original intention was that it is climbing out of a hole. The tree of the right I did in a white line, I thought this looked really nice, so I added a few darker lines and left it almost transparent, adding some clouds in behind it to add to this effect.

I think I could have done better in the actual painting of this. It took me a while but it still could have been taken further. The ram climbing from the yolk could have been drawn differently and the things flying in the sky could have been given different perspectives.

I found that my painting contained a collection of designs, and different parts of the painting could have been their own surreal painting. Where as this isn't necessarily a bad thing, I could have saved more time and gone into detail by choosing one idea and focusing in on it.