Megatron

Was inspired recently by a shirt a customer was wearing at work... a white outline of a transformer on a dark background. I fell in love with the shirt and persuaded one of the girls I work with to ask him where he got it.... "Canada", was the response... and apparently he had it custom made too, which meant I couldn't go home and order it online. I'd been looking for something to put on a canvas for above my bed for quite awhile... and this was perfect.

(Close-up)

So as inspiration hit me, I thought I'd start it straight away, (part of my problem is I have great ideas, but never start them) This time I was determined to finish it, and finish it I did. After giving up my days off to do this for two weeks, I finally completed it. There were a few choices I had, but I always loved transformers as a kid, and I found a decent source pic to go from. I was also trying to find a good pic of He-man on Battlecat or one of the AT-AT's from Empire Strikes Back.

(Click on pic to enlarge)

I chose quite a complicated procedure to do an otherwise simple straighforward painting... except for the fact that I wanted white lines on a dark background. Its hard to get fine lines without going over them alot to get them nice and white. So I took a different approach, after the pencil drawing, I did a yellow wash so when I painted the white lines I could still see them. To preserve the white lines when I did the dark background I masked them out with brown latex. When the background was dry, I pulled off the latex to reveal the white lines underneath.

This technique gave the whole image a very rough quality which contrasted nicely with the geometric shapes.... overall I'm quite happy with the final result.