experimenting with shapes

i’m not exactly sure how i came about this but i had been drawing trees with swirls by a river. i just really didn’t feel inspired by my straight-forward approach to painting/drawing water. paint it all blue and add shading is just too blah for me. and then i saw a photo of the IMAX whale movie at the Boston Science Museum and the photo was so small that i noticed how the water seemed more like ripples or waves. just bigger and longer! like maybe the way you would illustrate radio waves actually. and that was just what i needed to see. like a pinball after it’s been struck by the plunger, i was off. i had my trees and now my lake..but again paused with the sky. well, air contain water so why not use the same approach for the sky as i used for the water.

i won’t say i’m 100% thrilled with the result. i wouldn’t call it a fine work of art – it’s not. And at this point I'm not shooting for fine works of art because it's all practice. it’s IMO simply good doodling. but it’s an interesting approach to air and water that i intend on exploring further. how complicated can it get? and the funny thing is that through a friend, i received a suggestion to be a Facebook friend with an artist named aaron thornton. when i saw his profile pic, i understood. he’s doing a similar thing with the overall picture – he’s carving it up into segments (with color) and laying within the subject. (see for yourself…www.aaronthorntonart.com)