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Monday, 11 April 2011

Two Arthropods Meet - a teeny commission challenge

After meeting the tireless Karyn Traphagen at ScienceOnline11 in January, she asked me for an unusual commissioned painting: something on slate, no larger than 1.5"x2".

It was more difficult than I had thought.  I have often painted creatures and details that small -I knew I had the right brushes- but I had never tried to fit a whole composition in something that small.

The challenge was on.


Apparently I drink too much coffee to reliably use the camera's up-close feature.
The piece languished on my desk for a little while, unfinished, until I came up with the idea of adding the ladybug, an image that I've done in a similar way before in pencil. I added a bit of gold-coloured paint (actually titanium-coated mica flakes) to the ladybug to give it a shimmer.

Here's the final piece:




Thanks Karyn!
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Interested? I have a couple of larger, similar pieces painted on slate for sale and I remain available for commissions.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow

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5 comments:

  1. m.h.b.12 April 2011 at 11:38:00 GMT-4

    you should open one of them etsy stores!! i like the box too, nice finished piece!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Glendon Mellow12 April 2011 at 14:00:00 GMT-4

    I have one already! Link's at the top of the blog, "Buy originals". Nothing there this moment, but I'm uploading more this week. ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Marco Meredith12 April 2011 at 14:48:00 GMT-4

    What a wonderful little peice, so nice and such vibrant colours. The fact that its so small puts the subjects into a nice context aswell almost as if they are really there.

    M

    ReplyDelete
  4. Glendon Mellow12 April 2011 at 14:56:00 GMT-4

    Thank you Marco!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Karyn14 April 2011 at 22:37:00 GMT-4

    For the record, I felt like the way Glendon packaged this for me was a bit of performance art. It was so exciting to see the box with the sketch on the top, then open it and see a note on the canvas, then slowly unroll and reveal the commissioned piece. It wasn't until after I looked at the piece for a while that I noticed the title inside the bottom of the box. What a great presentation! I loved the attention to detail. Someone needs to hire this man!! I'm really privileged to own this work!

    ReplyDelete

Posts over 14 days old have their comments held in moderation - I've been getting an unusual amount of spam for a guy who paints trilobites. I'll release it lickety-split though.