Erik’s 100 Day Challenge: Say More With Less

[erikdennes]

Day 92 Dolphin

[erikdennes]

Day 93

went back to the Red Hawks mural. I’m just blocking in color and value to try and get things close.  Then I’ll go back and tweet.

[erikdennes]

Day 94

Almost done with the block in.

[Debbie H]

Your murals are looking good Erik. You asked about the underwater one – my only comment is that it perhaps looks a little empty; if you still have time and the lift, it could do with another couple of creatures/objects?? The dolphin looks like it’s an addition to this same mural? It may look that way to me because of the wide angle lens distortion though, so take my thought with a big grain of salt. Congratulations – you’re so close to the end!!

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by Debbie H.

[erikdennes]

Day 95

Thanks Deborah.  I think I will go back to the underwater mural and do some more fish.  I can do that on a ladder.

More red hawk.  I’m starting to get the values where I want them.

[erikdennes]

Day 96

putting in shadows and going over the lines.

[erikdennes]

Day 97

More shadows, figures, car.

[Gordan Knezic]

It is looking great Erik! I almost get dizzy by looking at the wall 🙂 It is very interesting composition, my eyes just keep moving around the image.

[Christopher]

Hi Erik,

What I’m curious about is than you first started with art and at the point you got your first commissions, were Murals one of your goals or did it randomly evolve over time?

Whatever the answer is I definitely really like your murals and also your other work. 👍👋

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by Christopher.

[erikdennes]

Day 98

Thanks Gordan and Christopher.

Gordan, the lighting on this wall is driving me crazy.  There are overhead lights right next to the wall which make very pronounced alternating light and dark stripes at the grout lines.  My perspective is fighting these strong horizontals and it makes me dizzy looking at it.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the other two huge sections of wall in this space to try and tame that lighting situation

Christopher, To answer your question, after being an elementary art teacher for 10 years, I got a job as a resource teacher helping with programs in our 5 visual art magnet schools.  I first started doing murals during my lunch break and if something I had scheduled got canceled for some reason.  The job evolved through several different phases, but I kept doing murals on the side with any free time I had.  Now with Covid, because our district is all virtual now, I’m doing murals full time until my boss tells me to do something else.  So it was really something I just stumbled into.

Im replacing a culturally insensitive image in the gym with the school’s red hawk logo.  It was kind of nice just painting yellow ochre and not having to think at all.

[Nick Hausman]

Hi Erik,

I am a fan of your work. Loved the school mural with the kids and the ocean mural as well.

In the red hawk mural, isn’t the blue car rather small? Based on the yellow lines It looks like you were going for a rapidly diminishing perspective, but it doesn’t seem to match up with the road width and nearby lamppost.

[erikdennes]

Day 99

Thanks Nick!  Yea, the blue car is a little small.  There are a lot of things that are not quite right in the perspective probably because I didn’t use a grid and just used my gut.  In a piece like this though, I don’t think the perspective needs to be very accurate, in fact it is really sort of not accurate on purpose.  My thought with the car was that I wanted to communicate a faster diminishment toward the right and left edges of the mural.  My thought with the street sign as to make it big to clearly see the form and the cast shadow which gives the image more depth.

I did a sketch for another section of the same wall.  I think I might dump this idea.  I’m not sure I could pull it off at the scale that I have to paint it, and those pesky stripes from the lighting might interrupt it too much since it is mostly the same value.  I think I need an idea with strong graphic shapes and more range of contrast in the values.

[erikdennes]

Day 100

Thanks to all who left comments and/or viewed this thread.  It has been really beneficial for me posting everyday and getting feedback from the NMA community.   Hopefully, some of you have gotten some benefit from my posts as well.  There is always a little bit of the teacher in me that comes out in my work and in my posts.

I feel like I have learned a lot from this challenge. I’ll probably do another 100 day challenge, but take a little break for a while before starting it.

 

For my post today, I had the idea to use the tiles on the wall to help make the composition instead of trying to fight them.  I came up with this idea where the focus is creating some nice color harmonies between the tiles and juxtaposing that with a hard edged, graphic, smoothed airbrushed rendering of a hawk.

Here is what it would look like on the wall.

And here is the image I created.

 

 

[Debbie H]

Congratulations Erik! Really well done! It’s been great seeing all of the interesting projects you’ve done over your challenge. All the best!

[Gordan Knezic]

Congratulations Erik you have accomplished a lot in these 100 days! It was pleasure following you along, all the best!

[Author]

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