Where we Were (Ancestors)

In the doodleism paintings there are creepy-crawly imaginary beasts, animals, plants, humanoids, and everything in between. In this painting I included as many as possible, including a chicken-shaped apartment building on the horizon. As usual for this style, the time of day and the place are ambiguous, up in the top right there is a starry night and moon, in the middle there is an undersea creature, and off to the left bottom there is a sunset.

I noticed a lot of yellow and gold colours in this painting. At the time, I had no knowledge of how to paint gold, but seem to have pulled it off admirably with combinations of lemon yellow and neutralizing greens and purples. Gold is in fact a type of darkened yellow, leaning towards the yellow-orange shade. The metallic look of gold is due to sharply defined variations in the gold tone and lightness. Tying it all together are flashes of purple, orange and turquoises. Rarely would I plan out a colour scheme, instead I go with whatever feels right as the painting develops. Each section would have been more or less complete before moving to the next section, then in the end I might have adjusted things a little. This painting has a great finish to it, by 2013 I had been doing the style for over 10 years and concentrated a lot on making each part the best it could be.

22 x 30" cold press, watercolour, 2013