As In Life, Also in Death

This was the skull sculpture that I made for my daughter's partner. I thought it would be interesting to show a series of photographs so you can see how I built the sculpture.

I can't seem to rotate the pencil drawing above! I used a medical annotated picture of a skull to copy.

This was the first couple of layers. The idea was to put a candle behind it for effect.

This is the finished version on its side for you to get an idea of how far it stuck out from the canvas. The material I used took some time to dry, but at certain stages you could manipulate it with your fingers to obtain the correct shape.

This is the finished version. I broke up glass mosaics and stuck them around the eye socket and around the painting. It represented the character who died but was still 'shining' as in life. The character had been killed by a blow to the head; that's why I put a dent in the skull's head on the right-hand side. They wanted to put candles behind it, but I had obviously done too many layers for it to show through, so I punctured the painting in various parts. I then bought some lead weights to put in the back of the painting so that it could stand up.

The Universe

'The Universe'

I copied this from a nasa photograph like the others. Similarly using layers of paint - dripping them on in this case - and pastels in places. The picture was then finished with many layers of fixent to give a glossy finish.

The Wide Earth

I used to say to my daughter 'I love you all the wide earth, the stars, and the universe', so when thinking of an idea for a present for 'daughter's day' (I invented it because she said it was unfair that mothers and fathers get a day but children don't), I decided to do 3 paintings on that theme.

Again the photograph doesn't do it justice, but similar to the other paintings, I used a layering technique, pastels, pens and added mediums to the paint that gave sections of it the look as if it was highly varnished .

'Favela'

My daughter named this painting as she said it reminded her of the 'Favelas'. The photograph doesn't do it justice really. The black divided parts are highly glossed and very textured, sticking out a few mm from the canvas, whilst the various shapes are either flat or are similarly textured. I was able to paint this quite quickly compared to the other paintings, and got the idea basically because I wanted to use up paint that would otherwise have become useless.