Epic Adventures in Public Relations: From Sketch to Finish Part II

Reusing and recycling are integral to my artwork production process.  Frequently, old bits become re-purposed with newer additions.  Pieces that weren't quite successful, or are just plain old and are no longer coherent with my body of work can find themselves re-worked in a heartbeat.  Sometimes even perfectly good pieces find themselves dragged into the fray.

Take for example Metropolis which became Merican-Tastic!  In under five minutes, it was yanked off the wall in my apartment, marched over to the studio, and slapped upside the head with some paint.  It never knew what hit it.  You can read about this unpleasant business on this earlier post, The Sacrifice: http://stevebankspunchingholesintherah-rah.blogspot.com/2012/03/sacrifice.html or see the abbreviated version below:

Before:

During:

After:

Epic Adventures in Public Relations started off as an entirely different piece as well.  It was much more concerned about color and texture relationships and not so much about narrative content.  Unfortunately, the only image I have of the old piece has poor lighting and color balance as evidenced below:

Somewhere in the process of reclaiming/re-purposing the piece, I actually had to take a hand saw and cut the piece lengthwise to rearrange some bits.  When I put the canvas back together I painted a zipper over the cut seam.

Here are a few preparatory sketches of some of the components that would be going into the final work.

After making several sketches of different ideas, I start to arrange the composition of the final piece with a few more sketches.

This next sketch is actually a straggler from a different batch of drawings/doodles I made for a different piece called Babelmundo.  I liked the ship, but didn't already had four ships in the works, so I just kinda put this one on the back burner for a future project/idea.

The finished piece Babelmundo -with only the four ships sailing the oceans.

Another tidbit I was playing with for 'The Golden Calf' part of the piece was using one of those extremely large advertising cows they tend to put outside of steak houses.  You know the ones I'm talking about?

Here are just two examples I saw (and actually photographed) within the last month.  These cows are advertising gold mines.

Anyway, I ended up using an image of  bullhead/cowmask I made years ago instead of the sign idea.  The sign cow needs to be fleshed out into something more fitting than just something tucked in the corner.

Back to the sketch though. Here is the cyclops doodle and the finished one.

...and the space station.

...and the Pharaoh.....and the Flying Contraption.......

Stir all of this together and you get Epic Adventures in Public Relations.