Golden (2007)
Elegant filler
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Around this time I had a couple of private commissions for 2 pencil drawings. I was basically given carte blanche with regards to subject matter--the best sort of commission. I put it off for a little bit and had an idea for what to do with it. When I surveyed the art I’d be showing at the World Fantasy convention in 2007 (Saratoga Springs, NY), I decided another painting with a female figure would not be appropriate given the lady-centric selection of work I was bringing.
I had an 8x10” hole to fill in my display, and the only limiting factor was I wanted a male involved in the image. I sat for a bit and somewhat unbidden, a fuzzy image flashed in my head. Basically, it was a male bust, straight-on, but almost all you could see was the man’s face; the rest was to be a wall of gold and patterning, all headdress and robes. I knocked out a thumbnail for it. Having done it, I continued thumbnailing other concepts, less focused on the headdress, but with the idea of tons of gold and decoration still. I think I did that just to see if second-guessing my intuition improved things. Sometimes it does. It didn’t.
After a number of approaches that didn’t focus on the wall-of-gold headdress idea, I returned to the headdress idea but began sculpting shapes out of it.
From there I proceeded to do the pencil drawing, above. It was actually done on the inside cover of one of my sketchbooks (Dreaming in Black and White, published in 2007), as requested. Scanning that in, a quickie value study in Painter followed:
