If I Only Could

I completed If I Only Could and started two other works this weekend. Below is the piece that is the furthest along. I am working on a title. Right now the working title is Another Island. The puddle unfortunately isn't working out. I think the shape feels unnatural and the reflection doesn't feel believable to me yet. I might put the painting to the side if this issue doesn't have a clean resolution. I don't want to break my pace and would rather put this painting to the side and come back to the challenge of getting the puddle just right. It would be great if the summer storms could get going and give me some puddles in alleys to look at for reference. 

That's really the fun of inventing worlds within my sketchbook.  There is the challenge of figuring out how the elements in your head will actually look and how they'll interact with each other. Working from photo references answers most of those questions up front. There are challenges there as well. It's more challenging to evoke mood and sometimes the visual reality feels artificial, so I find myself redrawing things to make them feel right to the mind's eye. This happens a lot when working with foreshortened figures.  The reality of what you seeing before you feels off and by bending the truth by lengthening arms and legs or exaggerating the size of body parts in relation to each other feels more real.

I am becoming more drawn to comic book perspectives. Yes, they are exaggerated, but they seem to match my perceptions of reality. For instance, I can remember times spent in the offices with school principles or bosses in trouble or in other stressful situations sitting across the desk from them and it seems as if I'm looking through a fisheye lens at them. They are in complete focus while the background is almost given a Gaussian blur and the perspective is elongated and curved. It's as if their faces are abnormally larger than their bodies and pushed out towards me and yet the distance between us seems vast. A football game could be played on top of their desk. This altered perception is due partly due to blood pressure, emotions, and the endorphins that naturally flow through our blood stream when ever we're in a stressful situations?  Yes, it's an visual illusion, but is this personal experience of that moment not reality?  This is how I recall those moments when recounting them to peers and loved ones and have relived them within my dreams. Reality seems very subjective.