Top Secret Art Project

My latest artistic undertaking is still a work in progress. I have been thinking about, and working on, this piece off and on since January. Some pieces just take more time. During the creation of this drawing, I have been very guarded about sharing any process pics. The vision God gave me for this work of art is very specific and it is of the upmost importance to me that the finished piece do justice to the picture in my mind’s eye. Yesterday, all my planning and layering started to come together and transform into something wonderful! Ahhh, I can’t take it anymore! I’m just so excited with how this drawing is coming together that I have to share it with you all! In order to preserve some of the mystery of this “top secret” art project, I have super-zoomed in and cropped these images.

Anyone care to venture a guess as to what my subject might be? 

Without giving away the entire surprise, I can reveal a few things about this work. The medium is oil pastel and this particular drawing employs a visual effect knows as optical mixture. Optical mixture is a very cool phenomena were our eyes visually blend individual colors to form completely new ones. Basically, our eyes take two (or more)  points of color and tell our brain to just go ahead and mix them to form the perception of a third. To trigger this effect, an artist applies separate areas of color in close proximity to one another. These individual moments of color then have the potential to form beautiful swaths of shading and gradation, when viewed from the proper distance. Think Pointillism, or a dot matrix printer.

Claude Monet, Poplars on the Bank of the Epte, 1892

Any guesses yet? Feel free to take a stab in the comments section below. There’s an attaboy (or attagirl) and a crisp high-five in it for the winner. ;)