He's friendly!

I have been working on this piece for more time than I care to admit.  This was my first time trying out hardboard.  I'm not sure I'll use it again.  I'm really partial to my wood panels/canvases and I had a lot of trouble getting the color/texture of the wall just right.  It could be that painting a wall is just really hard. There were days when I woke up and very politely asked the wall to look like a wall or a sort of wall.  Nope! It took a lot more texturing/layering than I originally planned.  And then to bring it into a bit of light on one side of the piece was almost more than I could bear.  

Whenever I pause on a piece I'm working on, I take a progress picture.  This helps me figure out if I need to backtrack before going forward again.  I also spend a lot of time looking at the piece, turning away, and looking at it again with a "new" perspective.  I'm not sure how many people have seen Big Bang Theory, but I feel a lot like Sheldon when he was trying to figure out what was wrong with an equation.

Unlike Sheldon, I was trying to figure out why the wall didn't look like a wall.    

But my idea eventually came through, and I'm thrilled with how it turned out.  You may be asking how the heck did this piece come to be.  Well it started with a book by Maja Säfström, who is one of my favorite artists.  Her drawing of a sea scorpion was my first experience with a sea scorpion.  Her sea scorpion is so friendly!

I feel pretty confident this is why I had a bizarre dream about a sea scorpion, which eventually evolved into this piece.  In my dream my sea scorpion was humongous and colorful. It looked a little bit like a cartoon.  So I had to play around/do some research/dig through my papers to find a good balance.  

I eventually settled on a few pages of an old pattern book that was falling apart and picked out my favorite colors/designs.  Though my sea scorpion is not as wildly imaginative as Maja Säfström's sea scorpion, he is still friendly looking, and I'm proud his friendliness is evident.  I'm not sure I really want to see an unfriendly sea scorpion, whether it's real or not.