Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Because of my textural experiments with encaustic (wax) work, I've decided to completely change my method of work. I'm now “painting” with a gluegun, both in a “natural” mode and then painted with a combination of wet and drybrush work, as well as some new experiments with custom hollow gluesticks impregnated with dry pigments and injected with wet acrylics as well…

The painting currently weighs about thirty pounds and because not only are there various polymer-based paints (quite solid), but also a great deal of wax and other fragile substances… I'm worried that with too much motion it could be damaged, so tomorrow I'm going to fiberglass the entire back of the canvas. Anyway, after that I'm going to repaint the entire background (the water), then the background schools of fish, and then lay down an immense forest of kelp using the gluegun technique (which you can see in the left picture). This painting is going to be three inches thick in areas!

Emphasis: this is still undercoating! The final will look very different!

This is one of those “learn as you go” paintings (story of my life), but I predict that it will either be one of my best paintings ever or… well… take me a long, long, long time to get it to that point (and I anticipate it will have a 60+ pound final weight). As I said in the title, at an utter minimum I have another twenty or thirty hours of work left.

EOF.

Why am I up this late? I have no good explanation… But I want to try and take tomorrow off as much as possible to paint and spend with Nefarious.

Oh, and does anyone in the Toronto area want to split a drive in a rental car (mine take too much gas) to the Carlisle Nationals for a couple days and then NYC for a couple more days (ie. May 19-23 or something)? If you do, please IM or write me. Normally I'd fly, but I'm so paranoid about saving money right now because there's a lot of work to do on BME and we had some processing problems that set us back…