Shiva's Fire: Completed

Here are some pics of the finished painting.

Shiva's Fire: Priming the canvas

After I finished with the dimensional paint going over the pattern, I hit the whole thing with a hair dryer to puff up the paint and then I put on a couple thin layers of blue gesso. The light blue in this picture is gesso. The dark blue is my first layer of acrylic paint over the gesso and the white is more gesso I put over the blue gesso to smooth out the texture. I built up several layers of gesso where the figure was going to go as a way to deemphasize the pattern underneath. This involved putting a layer down, letting it dry, sanding it, then putting on another layer. After these steps were complete I was finally ready to paint. You can see my reference photos on the wall.

Shiva's Fire: Texture

After finding a pattern that I liked I needed to find a way to preserve the pattern. What I decided to go with was using a dimensional fabric paint normally used on T-shirt crafty projects and such. The kind of paint that puffs up when it's exposed to high heat. (I didn't use this exact paint. I used tulip brand, white, velveteen.... which is basically the same as "puff" paint.)
Here is a test I did and then gessoed to see if it would retain dimensionality of the pattern.
If you look hard you can see the pattern in their somewhere. Happy with the results I began the 2 week long task of covering 16 square feet of pattern with this paint. (I really wish I would of taken some pictures of that.)

Shiva's Fire: Finding a canvas

I first looked into using a textured wallpaper as my canvas but I could not find a pattern I was completely happy with and a size that would work. Wallpaper generally comes in about 2 foot wide rolls. The canvas was to be 4 x 4 so I had to go with something else. After doing some shopping at a few fabric stores I came across this-This was a scrap of drapery I found at a fabric store that specialized in drapery/upholstery. Luckily they had it in a size that would work for my canvas. After I bought it I stretched it on stretcher bars as you would normal cotton canvas.

Summer work: Shiva's Fire

Over the past summer I was lucky enough to land a job doing some experimental paintings for a great client. One of the paintings I developed dealt with the theme of fire. To begin the project I created a digital sketch for the client to approve. (see below)



I wanted to develop a painting using an arabesque or other type of pattern. Possibly using a multimedia approach. What I ended up doing was something very different than anything I had done before....