The Making of "Icarus"

I am extremely proud of this particular piece.  It took almost nine months to complete.  Most of that time was spent procrastinating and getting distracted by other projects.  The wood was bought at Lowes and it measures 24" x 24" which has been one of my larger works.

I had wanted to do my own depiction of Icarus for a while.  I'm fascinated with his story.  Heartbreakingly EPIC.

As a completed work, I wanted to overlap an illustration (blending realism with elements of design) on top of the "painted wood grain" technique while utilizing both positive and negative space.  You are looking at the back of Icarus as he is flying into the sun.  His head is hanging so far forward that it is out of picture.  This is intentionally exaggerated because adding hair or even the top of his head wouldn't look quite right.  I just couldn't get it.  I had the same issue with the legs.  The natural wood grain patterns seemed to be dripping from his torso....so I decided to enhance that idea.  In the end, I deemed "head" and "legs" to be irrelevant. 

The skin tones and sun rays (yellow) were drawn with colored pencil.  I seem to be able to produce highlights/shading techniques best with colored pencils and graphites.  Colored pencils also allow the natural wood grains to show through better than a solid coat of paint.  Colored pencil was only used on skin and the yellow that you see above in the sun.  All lines are drawn with mechanical pencil using HB 0.7 graphite.  Once everything was colored, two generous coats of polyurethane were sprayed on.  Finally, ALL lines were traced again to achieve bolder lines.

Painting the wood grains was an extremely time consuming process because all four colors required at least two coats each.  The lightest orange peach color (not pictured above) required three and sometimes four coats to get solid. 

This is the end result.  Completed in early January 2012.  I really wanted the natural wood grains to be an important part of the work.  The patterns are organically based.  This piece represents a balance of my current technical strengths.