Sketches Better Than Paintings

Sometimes I wonder if the sketches look better than the paintings. 

Trilobite Boy with Gargoyles - sketch.

Trilobite Boy with Gargoyles - complete. 

There's something about the scratchiness of it I don't usually retain in the finished pieces. That's why I think I'm enjoying drawing and then placing the original drawing over the digital painting on a multiply layer. I'm catching the scratchiness a bit better. 

Avimimus - pencil drawing.

Avimimus - painted using the Sketch Club app on my iPhone. 

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Almost used this sketch

Recently, over on Symbiartic, I posted a piece ruminating about copyright and the utility of good scientific illustration, called Dinosaur Couture Should Be Open To All. I hesitated putting the post up, since although tangential, I thought some sort of illustration riffing on dinosaurs and high fashion would enhance the post. 

Squeezing in time to make any sort of artwork is next to impossible the past couple of weeks: our son is teething, not sleeping well and I'm very behind my self-imposed deadlines. So I spent some time and tried to work on the sketch above, thinking maybe a model with some sort of fossil couture outfit could be fun. The face is pretty flawed, I didn't use an actual model. Perhaps I was thinking of Eva, from America's Next Top Model season 3?

Ultimately not happy with it, I decided instead to attempt a breezy fashion design sketch, using watercolours in ArtRage. 

C'mon, the hipster pants and shoulder pads on the right not doin' it for ya?

I was scrambling to complete it before posting and heading out the door...in the end, I erased the two dinos on the sides, and went with the parasaurolophus in the spring dress. 

Ok. Not my best work. But I hope a splash of colour livened up the post. 

I feel hopeful about getting some sort of studio and blogging schedule back on track soon. We're going to try some new things with Calvin's sleep schedule to allow him to be more rested, and in turn, me more rested. I love being a stay at home dad and freelancer: it's a balancing act that's tipped a bit askew, that's all. 

I'll leave this post with a fanciful parasaurolophus I'm more proud of. 

Check out Dinosaur Couture Should Be Open To All on Symbiartic! 

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Art Monday: our hero so far

Click to enlarge.

In-process work for Trilobite Boy Saves the Day. Above, a screenshot of what my desktop looks like while using ArtRage, a digital painting program (I'm using 2.5, and would love to buy 3.0).  I need to add smoke and fire coming from the oil rig. Art Rage feels a lot like real paint, and I may still go into Photoshop and add some atmospheric effects and blurring to the horizon, as well as some texture to the waves. 

Below, an initial sketch of our hero.  His legs will be dripping with Gulf oil. 

I might make him slimmer and less muscular to match other images of the character.  Originally, this whole concept was going to have Trilobite Boy standing on a rooftop with a towel around his neck.  I'm also not sure about the costume logo I whipped up: maybe just the flying trilobite design, instead?

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Final Project update #4

[Updates 1, 2 and 3]

Okay. I've worked through the Ugly Phase. Thanks to bloggers Melliferax, Tracey, Stephanie, Betül, Geoff and Traumador for support and encouragement, mainly via Facebook. (Are you a Flying Trilobite fan on Facebook? Clickity click here.) Many others have given me valuable feedback at other stages too. Thanks everyone! And thanks to my wife Michelle for watching me freak out over the construction more than a couple of times.

This is the last project of my undergrad, and I think here at the 11th hour, I've solved the construction issues. I'll blog the final project after I take it to class and get sleep.

Here's what the centerpiece of the project looked like after completion:The colour is correct above. It's easier to take a good picture of oils on an angle.

Here's what it looked like after I hit it with a hammer:

Long way to go yet.

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The Ugly Phase of my final project

Tomorrow it shall be glorious.

I'm pretty far into my final project, which you can see portions of here and here.  

I've blogged before about how most of my paintings go through an Ugly Phase before they're done (and every frickin' time I'm surprised).  Right now, this one is so ugly I'm going to walk away for a bit. 

I'm calmer now.  Earlier, I kinda freaked out via Twitter. 

Here it is in its ugliness: 

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Art Monday: here's an ugly fellow

A detail from my in-progress Asthma Incubus II, painted entirely digitally using ArtRage 2.5 and my Intuos 3 tablet.

Hmm. I need to fix the eyelashes a bit. I like them long and pretty on this ugly face though.

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Asthma Incubus II progress

Progress so far on my new version of Asthma Incubus. Click to enlarge.

The original drawing from a few years ago:

A background to inspire the mood, painted in ArtRage using my Wacom Intuos 3 tablet:

I've hidden the background here so I don't distract myself while I play with the details. Using paint, metallic paint, airbrush and pencil tools. Mainly focusing on the Asthma Incubus itself:


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Art Monday: settling in

Although I haven't had very much time to draw and paint lately, I can feel the beginnings of new routine establishing itself.

The trip to York U is a long one, and I have my trusty iPod Touch with the Brushes app to sketch with while bumped and jostled on the subway and bus.

For the moment, my class on Drawing & Narrative is on Tuesday mornings and I'm taking the whole day off work so I can get in some studio time in the afternoon.

I've started and stopped so many projects lately that I'm actually creating a checklist to keep them straight. Here's where I left off the Anomalocarid Dress that I began for Art Evolved's last group gallery:

I'm using Artrage, and this image on the right is such a massive hodge-podge of techniques. I am still sorting out my workflow, and this image is on many layers while I do that. Painting over top of the existing pencil sketch seems to be less rewarding than if I had completed the sketch in ArtRage itself.

There's a long way to go, and this is deep in the Ugly Phase: that phase of painting where I almost can't look at it. It's essentially an underpainting of colours to support more detailed layers over top. Although ArtRage functions realistically like oil in many ways, I have to kind of lay down a process for myself.

Normally when painting on canvas, I pre-prime the canvas with either a raw umber or straight ivory black. I enjoy the process of painting and watching the figures edge their way out of the darkness. It's like the image reveals itself on black instead of appearing on white.

With this image, I began by painting over the sketch, meaning over an off-white. So I added heavy blacks, and they feel big and globby.And the skin isn't right. I wanted a lopsided smile, but turned it into a deformed mouth. I'll likely need to start over, delete the scanned sketch page, leaving only the drawing, or reverse the values of the scanned image.

Let's see what I can do to correct this image in days to come.

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Hesitation

Some paint is on canvas.

I hesitate.

Traditional painting involves planning. Sketches. A clear vision. There is no "undo" function. Oil paints are capricious. As they dry, they darken but also become more transparent. Mistakes are revealed, old compositional frameworks exposed. The graphite in pencil can float to visibility on the surface.

Bah. I don't worry about the graphite. These days I aim to immortalize the pigments and oil with pixels and photons. But I must get the composition right. I want this painting to be able to be framed as an oil.

I need to begin my altered chess pieces. They make the painting. This is only the background.

Yet I hesitate.

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Darwin Day Liveblog 5: deep in the ugly

At this phase, I feel like I can't stand the painting. If I wasn't clocking myself, I'd probably move on to a different piece. Charles is feeling it too: he's aged 20 years since the pencil sketch somehow.

Starting to work on the fossil skull. Maybe flipping on my iPod will help me pull it outta this nosedive by Liveblog 6.
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Darwin Day Liveblog 4: holy yellow batman

The Ugly Phase indeed.
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Darwin Day Liveblog 1

While doing the dishes last night I hit upon a composition I think works -er, not of Charles Darwin doing the dishes, but my mind wanders with the suds.

It's been a busy month so far of travel and illness, and I'm a little behind. Last year, I was ahead of the game with a drawing I was already quite pleased with, and photographed results every hour, and the painting took three. Drawing is the skeleton and muscle on which the skin of oil paint rests, and it takes time to grow. Painting on a time limit can help me work through the despair I often feel when a piece is in the ugly phases. Let's see what happens today. Forgive me, if today's exercise is not a triumph, but merely a stalemate.

Let's dive in.

Sketch one, above, inspired by suggestions made by Karen James. Perhaps this will become a full-fledged piece, but nautical vessels are not at the moment a strength I've tapped.

Thumbnail sketch, above.

Working out the pose using a super-heroic model for structure and shadow, above.

Early face and pose. Enter...the glyptodont!

Scanning and tweaking to post is taking a bit. I'll forge ahead and be back by 6 pm eastern standard!

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Art Monday: it doesn't always work

Dark! Dark are the days when the artist's mind and hand will not act with confidence, but with trepidation, and lo, the monstrous paint that issues forth from his palette vexes him and plagues his talent. For true, not every act of creation can escape sucking.

This bombastic post is about the paintings that haven't been rehabilitated. I hope to have some news in the near future, and I am working on a number of projects a the moment. Today, I will shine a light on what happens when they don't work out.

Usually after reading some scientific discovery and musing about it, most ideas pop into my head like a full-blown image. I know what I should do to make it happen, and the idea is laid out in my mind's eye like pages in a book. I'm just copying from my imagination. If there are elements missing, well that's where research takes over, and I look for something appropriate to the subject.

Mother MarsThis oil painting languished unfinished for over a year. The Mother-Nature-on-Mars figure was complete, the sky complete and even the inscription (hard to make out on a blog) of "ALH84001" on the rock.

I stretched it myself, and seriously planned on painting over the entire image many, many times. It needed a baby, an egg, something at the start of life. Over and over I painted mermaid's purses, more accurately known as shark's eggs. The night before a gallery show, I frantically painted a huge microorganism complete with a chain of magnetite like they found in the infamous Martian meteorite. I kept stealing glances at it at the show. The painting surprised me. A wasted, dying mother nature and dying microbaby found dignity instead of a coat of black gesso.

Trilobite Graveyard (detail of headstone)


Which trilobitologist hasn't hoped to come across this legendary place? This painting is what unfortunately happens when I haven't thought it all the way through. In 2006 my wife challenged me to give a landscape a try, and I thought of an underwater scene, with yellow light for some reason, and a graveyard of trilobites stretching away into the distance. With well over 10 000 species recorded, this would be a fitting way to show their vast numbers,vast age, and the vast populations gone from our fair Earth.

I just couldn't pull it out of its ugly phase. (And, true to the nature of this post, my camera is broken and I seem to have deleted the photo of the whole image, and have only this detail. Arrgh, I say. )

I thought about anomalocaris prowling above, like predatory caretakers. It would add a mournful tone, for the predators can't outlast their prey for long, and add a sense of mystery as to what happened.

I thought about adding a fetching scuba diver to draw the viewer into the scene. Most people respond easily to an image they know, such as a human. Making it an attractive woman would also garner attention, and elements like long hair floating upward with bubbles would allow me to demonstrate the scene is underwater.

I thought about a monstrous underwater temple with a particularly spiky trilobite on top, off in the murky distance. Perhaps the trilobites were up to something sinister, or represented a vast empire in eldritch Cthulhu-esque prehistoric times?

So instead, this Art Monday, let me direct you to the following spectacular artwork that have themes -successfully!- similar to the Trilobite Graveyard:
various episodes of Walcott's Quarry at eTrilobite for the menacing anomalocarids;
at Druantia Art, an underwater scene in progress that is breathtaking even in unfinished form (buy her calender!);
bold rays of light not afraid to overlay some colour at The Day After;
and the beginnings of Cthulhu's rise at When Pigs Fly Returns.

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Artwork Mondays: Art is Easy

Art is easy.

Last week I lamented it is hard. And although finding the time for art is difficult, I am never at a loss for ideas. That said, collaboration often takes me places I never thought I'd go.

So on this Artwork Monday, I'd like to try a challenge:

For the first person to comment with a really unusual idea, I will try to come up with at least a sketch and post it by editing this post by midnight tonight. I'll check back on the comment section in about 12 hours (6pm eastern standard).

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Edit: Okay, so maybe the previous Artwork Monday post was correct. Finding time for art is hard. I'm a few hours late, and the sketch is a little too simple and uninspired.

Rudi and Traumador's ideas deserve a little more time devoted to them, don't you think? I had some technical difficulties with another project I was working on last night, and well, it gobbled up my evening. Perhaps later in the week I'll post a couple of other pieces I've been working on behind the scenes for a while now.

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All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.

Artwork Mondays: Art is Hard

Art is hard.

Last year I posted this:


The idea was a steampunkish device to aid the painter. I called it the Hyperferrule. Hooked up to the visual centre of the brain, it would enable me --uhhh, I mean the artist, heh-- to rapidly paint the image in their mind's eye. Swap out those mechanical finger-tip brushes, and the little arms could draw something using graphite and an eraser. Maybe a tortillon smudger would be in there too, to get some nice shadows going.

Lately, I keep thinking about this image. I'd love to do a self-portrait about it. Me, standing next to a canvas, one hand furiously painting, the other drawing. There'd need to be some stark shadows and studio light, an out-of-focus model nearby, perhaps human, perhaps fossil.

I keep thinking about it. And at the moment, that's all I can do.

This isn't intended to be a whiny, whinging complaint. I'm really striving for a lofty lament about the torturous and demanding muse so many artistic types suffer from. It's hard to tell the difference. If I was whining, I'd stamp my foot.

Creative blocks have never hit me. The more I sketch, or think about sketching, the more ideas start flowing. On my way home today, I stopped on the Queen West sidewalk near Claremont, pulled out my Moleskine and had to sketch a full-blown image of a landscape while blocking foot traffic. I struggle a bit with landscapes, and this one excited me. Stay tuned for the surprise.

Art is hard. There's a steady flow of ideas and I strive to get some of them down at least a bit in pencil. Aim for something interesting and maybe if I'm on my game, someone finds it astounding.

I wish I had Degas' money. Idle rich, nothing to do all day but paint vampiric-looking ballerinas and go to the track. Like many of the artists (and probably everyone) I don't have enough time. I have a full-time job, work with some great people and freelance on the side. The freelance is going well, I've got four projects currently on the go. They're a blast to do, people who really get me, I think.

But this Artwork Monday is all about the things unfinished, the ideas I haven't forgotten but I've left alone to wander and prowl about in my studio.

Remember this Dimetrodon-Sphinx?


I've played with it a bit digitally, to practice my digital work. I plan on getting a computer tablet later this year and I'd love to play with a couple of backgrounds. A mountain terrain, a street at night.

Over the summer I played with a piece I really enjoy, and in my head is filled with a soft riot of colour, Trilobitlepidoptology: It needs some shadows, and colour.

Last year, I embarrassed myself a little bit trying to do a portrait of Richard Dawkins. I even emailed his website folks.
Then, I tried a different technique, and killed the drawing. It only exists as a digital file now. I can resurrect it, print it on canvas paper and paint over it. I meant it to be a diptych with Carl Sagan. I'd really love to get back to it, Richard Dawkins' writing has inspired so much of my work. A humble tribute, sidetracked for now.

There's more. A dress based on a fossil, sketches for a kids' book of aliens evolving, a trilobite graveyard...

*sigh*

Next week on Artwork Mondays: Art is Easy

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All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.

Artwork Mondays: White Trilobite

*sigh*
Not every painting is close enough to perfect for the artist to feel happy about it. Sometimes I hesitate to post sketches, fretting I'm not putting my best foot forward. This oil painting is a sketch too, of sorts, although at the time I intended it to become a final illustration.

A few years ago, I had an idea for a story book, about a trilobite on a quest. It would have been a bit dream-like as far as narrative, mostly a thin thread tying together a series of images I had in mind. This was to be the first illustration, a trilobite illuminated by a powerful shaft of light from an angler fish or other bioluminescent denizen of the deep.

The image is missing an entry point for the viewer, either a fish or person watching the scene alongside our view, or a nearby plant. There is nothing floating in the murk in the distance, or any refuge points for the viewer to grasp on to. The composition needs a lot of work. And our hero needs eyes and maybe even some corrected anatomy.

It is possible I've grown enough as an artist I could paint the rest to my satisfaction, and even a few simple circular white flecks done hastily in Photoshop have piqued my interest again. I like the idea of a trilobite able to change its colour to match its environment like a squid or chameleaon, and it would have throughout the story.

So many ideas, so little time.
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Artwork Monday: Mother Mars

In honour of the Phoenix lander's successful touchdown in the Martian Arctic last night, I thought I would share a painting done a number of years ago.

Mother Mars

This painting was inspired by the Martian meteorite, ALH84001 and the inscription is carved into the rock in the bottom left.

The figure represents a mythology that never-was, the personification of Mother Nature on the planet Mars, wasted and haunting.

After struggling with a "mermaid's purse" shark egg to represent the false hope of organisms on Mars, I eventually attended a lecture at the University of Toronto where the topic of discussion was the possible discovery of fossil remnants in a meteor that originated on Mars. I learned about the magnetite chains found in the meteor, and watched a video of the cute little microbes whipping this way and that, following a moving magnet. I replaced the shark egg with an enlarged, ruptured microbe immediately.

Until that lecture, this painting sat unfinished and abandoned for over a year, and I was sure I would paint over it. It's something I seldom do, but I really wasn't fond of it. The addition of the magnetite-bearing microbe made all the difference to me.

The face was a sort of riff on the infamous hill-face on Mars, later proved to be simply a low-res, shadowed coincidence. I felt the debunked image lent a certain poignancy to Mother Mars.

Mars is what we make it. Perhaps Phoenix will find signs of life in the Martian arctic? If not, it continues to be a planet of hope, and one we invest more myths, ideas and dreams in than any planet other than our own.

Here is one of Phoenix's of the Martian arctic:

(Photo from NASA site) Make sure to head over to the Phoenix site over the coming days, weeks and months for astounding findings. Also, check out the ever-entertaining Bad Astronomy blog for more news and commentary.

Cheers, to all involved with the Phoenix project!
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Artwork Mondays: Precambrian Rabbit

As noted on the last Artwork Monday, I am working on a new oil painting on a shale surface. The piece is a puzzle, inspired by the quote from the late biologist J.B.S. Haldane when asked what would disprove the fossil record of evolution:

"Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian."

Painting on shale is not particularly difficult. Originally, I had completed some of the work on by using a clear acrylic gesso, and then simply painting in oil on top. Gesso, for the non-artsy folks reading my blog is a fancy fine art term for a primer. Real gesso is made from calcium carbonate and rabbit-skin glue. There are some purists who disdain using modern acrylic-based gesso and prefer to use the traditional method. Pshaw! I say, pshaw! Rabbit-skin glue tends to absorb and lose humidity to the air, which can cause flexing and cracking under the paint film. Acrylic polymers do not have this problem, unless foolishly watered-down. Three cheers for modern chemistry!

I don't use any toxic solvents in my work, as I think they are simply not worth the risk. Anyway, why use those when there are more and more nontoxic equivalents on the market? (Another cheer for the chemists!) I'm not sure what taltine or turpentine would do to the shale, but it doesn't matter with the technique I am using.

I tend to paint in thin layers of colour, not as many as the great Renaissance masters like Leonardo da Vinci, but perhaps about 3 to 6 layers on each piece. On some of my canvas pieces, such as Life With Diatoms and My Life With Trilobites, I have used thick-as-honey stand oil as a final surface, giving the pieces a glossy appearance, intuitively grasped as organic when viewed in person. Stand oil is simply linseed oil that had been thickened by heat. Flip a jar of it upside down and watch how slowly the bubble rises.

Once, when I tried to coat a quick sketch of a shale-painting in stand oil, it dried in a weird way, clumping in little contours and folds, almost completely obscuring the weird little face beneath.

When choosing colours for the fossil rabbit, I have to think forward to what the trilobites will look like, as well as make it match the subject matter. I considered making the rabbit fossils bright pink to illustrate their false position in the strata, show them to be impossible. However, I think a stark white will do the trick, since most fossils are not so clean and bony, the bones long since replaced by mineral content. And here we are so far:

I would definitely say this is right in the Ugly Phase, and I want to paint out the background with Payne's Grey s badly, but that will delay painting any trilobites. The colours here will allow me to make some interesting rock-like trilobites, hopefully more subtle and appealing to the eye as being the real-deal.

My apologies for the late post.
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Making of "Darwin Took Steps"

For Darwin Day 2008, I decided to work on a surreal portrait of Charles Darwin, which is to be published today at the online literary 'zine, The Eloquent Atheist. There should be some writing accompanying it from one of the Darwin Day organisers, Dick Renfro. (Edit! Here's the link!) I always enjoy seeing another artist's process in creating a work, and I have found some scientists who read this blog are also interested in seeing the greasy nuts & bolts that go into a painting.

I am not a biologist, but I am something of a biology/palaeontology groupie. Darwin's work is so important not only for explaining a process of evolution by natural selection, but also for how it exploded the traditional chain of mythologies humans lived with as explanations for so long. The modern Bright movement and sites like The Eloquent Atheist seek to show how a life without religion and the supernatural can be intellectually and emotionally fulfilling.

In my continuous struggle to improve my own madartskillz I am also trying to create works reminiscent of Symbolist and Surrealist masterpieces replete with symbols drawn from our modern scientific worldview. Why use Odin to symbolise wisdom when you can paint Darwin?

Making of Darwin Took Steps

1. Thumbnail sketches
These were just thumbnails, showing an elderly Darwin pondering what to write next. The one near the top right has a "tangled bank" of branches floating above his head. From the start I knew I wanted to depict Darwin in his later years, as it is a more generally recognised image. I discarded both of these ideas in favour of the staircase idea.

2. Beginning the drawing.

For the drawing, I drew upon a reference from National Geographic's November 2004 issue. (Cover title: "Was Darwin Wrong?". The answer inside, almost a page tall: "NO.") One of the goals for this painting was to see how quickly I could do it, and still be proud at the end. In this instance I gave up drawing freehand and used a projector to create the sketch above, which is something I rarely do. That took 20 minutes. Refining a drawing that size without the projector can take another 2 to 3 hours. Materials: 2mm pencil on vellum-finish bristol paper. (Must perform life drawing for three hours in penance for using the projector...)

3. Staircase and a false start.

The staircase is an older idea of mine I used on a piece called Disease. It was developed as a cd cover and never published. I like the image though, and thought it would be appropriate. The column in the background is supposed to suggest the path leading unexpectedly to D.N.A, beyond Darwin's scope. I checked the drawing in a mirror a lot, to see if there were any gross abnormalities that stood out. Noticed a staircase coming out of his head. During this phase, I was listening to Jakalope in my studio, which is actually a freakishly large closet off our living room.

4. Completed drawing.

This is the drawing as complete as I decided to make it for painting. I used a .3mm mechanical pencil, HB lead on vellum-finish bristol. Love that Strathmore. In total, the drawing itself took about 3.5 hours. I jettisoned the d.n.a. column idea, and left the staircase leading up and away, the edifice not yet finished. I had fun with the little 'chi' lines in the beard. After tweaking the contrast in Photoshop, I printed the drawing out onto a couple of sheets of canvas paper from my laser printer to paint on.

5. Prepping for 'speed-painting'.
I decided to work in our living room, claiming the coffee table as my territory. I use Turpenoid Natural rather than other solvents. It smells of pine and is not full of nasty toxic hydrocarbons like most odourless solvents. The pliers are to get my oil tubes open. (Seriously, are all tubes made by people who've never had to open them more than twice? The caps are all different by brand, but they all get stuck.) I wanted this piece to have an older, sepia-feel to it, so linseed oil rather than a paler poppy or walnut was just fine. I am armed with Bavarian Dutch Chocolate coffee in my Jack Skellington mug.

My palette consisted of Naples Yellow (which I am addicted to), Quinacradone Orange, Cadmium Yellow Medium, Monochrome Tint Warm, Burnt Sienna (which I hate), Raw Umber, Payne's Grey, Zinc+Titanium White and Lamp Black. A lot of people swear you shouldn't use white or black (and you should mix your own from blue and brown), and I say, stop living in the Impressionist Era! It's so over! Lamp black is warm and deep, like pvc goth-gear in a tube.

I set the timer to stop me every hour. My aim was to finish the painting in 3 hours.

6. Results after 1 hour.

Usually I start with the eyes. I worked out the face, mainly with a cad-yellow underlayer. Monochrome tint and white for highlights. I was listening to Darude, The Chemical Brothers, and a Nine Inch Nails remix album. The faster the beats, the fresher my brush strokes. This is deep in the Ugly Phase , where I just hate how it looks. No time to fret; hour two!

7. Results after 2 hours.

Started using a phylogenetic tree in the background, painting with quinacradone orange underneath, and iridescent gold oil paint on top. Renaissance masters usually painted a red basecoat under gold leafing to add luster. I am using some micron brushes my wife put in my stocking at Christmas. They are really tiny synthetic brushes, and the filbert is now my bf4evr. Some artists say oils must be painted with rough hog's bristle brushes, and then I just yell, stop living in the Impressionist Era! Old master used soft brushes for detail, and so do I.
It's not done. I need to move toward hour 3.

8. Results after 3 hours, colour corrected.
The final piece, colour-corrected in Photoshop.

I fretted about how dark it looked on some monitors, and after submitting the image to editor Michael W. Jones at The Eloquent Atheist, emailed a second colour-corrected version, seen above.

Complete! ( edit: Here is the full-colour-corrected image and how it appears in my online reproduction store, a portion of the profits going in support of The Beagle Project.)

Assigning a number to any amount of steps would be arbitrary, but I chose 5 for a reason. Four for the support of evolution by natural selection (Darwin drew upon examples of 1. biogeography, 2. morphology, 3. embryology, and 4. palaeontology), and the fifth step for natural selection itself, or the elevation of reason over dogma, as the viewer likes. The steps of learning never end.

Please check this out on The Eloquent Atheist today, and leave comments! Constructive feedback is always welcome. I will edit this post later today to provide the link once it is up. Merry Darwin Day!
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All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.