UNTITLED by Michael Whelan, week 23 in his LEFTOVERS & PALETTE GREMLINS gallery project.
These are off a palette…well, actually just a piece of foam-core I was using as a palette.
One of the smears started to look a bit feline to me so I just ran with it. The paints are from a palette used for a painting which will be in the gallery show I’m in this coming August at the Tree’s Place Gallery.
Source: michaelwhelan.com
BEE TAXI by Michael Whelan, week 22 in his LEFTOVERS & PALETTE GREMLINS gallery project.
I call this new one “Bee Taxi”. At least, that’s what I saw when I turned the Gessobord I was using as my palette upside down.
HARBINGER, the last painting I used this palette for, had a lot of yellows in it. When I finished, I covered the palette with a yellow ocher gesso so I could use it again. Recently, while working on a small black wash rendering, I made marks on the board that suggested a scene to me.
I added details today and now I don’t want to cover it up with another layer of gesso. Looks like I’ll be fishing around for a new panel to use as a palette when I start my next painting.
I realize a real bee’s wings probably flap at a different angle than the blurry representation in this little piece, but that smudge allowed me to visualize the image in the first place, so I left it as I found it. If I used this sketch as a springboard into a regular painting, I would research and adjust the blur of the wings accordingly.
Source: michaelwhelan.com
PRINCESS IN PETALS by Michael Whelan, week 21 in his LEFTOVERS & PALETTE GREMLINS gallery project.
This week’s palette “Femlin” was just a sequence of brush strokes made with a Japanese calligraphy brush. It’s an old brush—one I’ve owned since college (!)—and it keeps losing it’s point.
I was painting random mountain shapes at the time, with cracks and furrows in earth. The brush would split into random forked shapes and served well to create unexpected linear shapes in some areas where I needed that. But off and on I would need the brush to form a good point for drawing lines in the rocks, so I kept shaping the point by swiping the hairs of the brush on a piece of scrap paper.
Naturally it made a shape that caught my eye and insisted on being taken further. I took a pencil and added the profile to the right side. Later, when I was using white paint, I spotted in stars and other details.
Source: michaelwhelan.com
UNTITLED by Michael Whelan, week 20 in his LEFTOVERS & PALETTE GREMLINS 2016 gallery project.
This one started as a smear of turquoise paint on a scrap of mat board.
I often keep scraps of paper or mat board near me when I’m working so I can quickly check the color and pigment load I have on a brush before setting it to the painting I’m working on.
As I went darker with the turquoise color on the main painting, I kept adding marks to the mat board until I had layers of different values of turquoise crosses overlapping each other on the mat board. It began to look like a spacesuited figure to me.
As I worked on my main painting, I would lean over every so often and add a detail here and there to give the picture more resolution.
Source: michaelwhelan.com
TRIPOD WALKER by Michael Whelan, week 19 in his LEFTOVERS & PALETTE GREMLINS gallery project.
Painted on the back of a misprinted Dark Tower image that we offer in the website shop. The print is on such a fine grade of heavyweight watercolor paper that I’m loathe to throw it away if there’s any hope of my reusing it for some other purpose. In this case, I was employing the paper as a mixing palette of mostly white, yellow ocher, and raw umber.
The shape suggested by a brush mark made me think of creatures described in Stephen King’s THE WASTE LANDS, long beaked, bird-like things that resemble “walking camera tripods”. The image never left my mind after reading the book.
As I worked on the main painting—which at the time was HARBINGER—I tweaked the shapes here and there, added the legs, and covered some of the splashes that did not fit in with the mental picture in my head.
One day perhaps this sketch will lead to an actual illustration of the scene, which I’m sure should be darker and more hellish than what I indicated in this sketch.
Source: michaelwhelan.com
NIGHT’S MISTRESS (2016) by Michael Whelan, week 18 in his LEFTOVERS & PALETTE GREMLINS gallery project.
She started as a few smeary brushstrokes in that dark purple-black color and nothing else. It had an interesting look to it—a curvy sinuous feeling—so I saved it to play around with later.
Source: michaelwhelan.com
MISTER RIGHT by Michael Whelan, week 17 in his gallery project LEFTOVERS & PALETTE GREMLINS.
This began as a loose, quick test of a brush-load of some sepia color [actually alizarin crimson mixed with sap green] on a scrap of canvas while I was working on one of the new Tad Williams covers.
Seen out of the corner of my eye, it started to look rather like a face to me. I went back into it and cleaned up the outside edges with white gesso and left it as a silhouette for a few hours. Later I went in and filled in the features—such as they are—with colors I was using in my palette at the time.
After spending hours painting finicky little details on swords for the DAW covers it was a nice break to apply myself to something more organic and loose.
Source: michaelwhelan.com
WTF by Michael Whelan, week 16 in his LEFTOVERS & PALETTE GREMLINS<> gallery project.
Ever have one of those days?
While applying black gesso to a panel, I tipped the cup holding the liquid onto the floor. What a mess! I know it’s only a trick of the mind but the black gesso seemed to take longer to clean up than white gesso; no matter how many times I washed the sponges out they still kept a gray tinge. My hands haven’t been so irredeemably soiled since my gas station days when I was in college.
Anyway, there was enough black on the cheap 4" house painting brush I was using to swipe this expression of my frustration onto a piece of scrap paper.
Source: michaelwhelan.com
TABLETOP RAMBLER (2016) by Michael Whelan, week 15 in his LEFTOVERS & PALETTE GREMLINS gallery project.
I was chatting with Jordu Schell on the phone one night last week while working on a painting. I should have known better than to try to get serious work done! He’s too entertaining to listen to. ;)
After a while, I put aside my illustration and became fascinated with an accidental shape on my tabletop. Some months before I’d made the mark with a sponge saturated with brown paint—I often use sponges to create textures in my acrylic paintings—but now as I stared at it, a creature appeared before me.
I sketched an outline in chalk and painted in the creature while chatting the hour or so we were on the phone. By the time we said our goodbyes, I had a beastie walking across my table. Subsequent conversations over the next day or two gave me time to add a moon and other details, employing the colors I had on hand at the moment.
He looks determined to make his way, and I’m betting he has a sizable appetite. Better steer clear of him!
Source: michaelwhelan.com
STRAWHEAD by Michael Whelan, week 13 in his LEFTOVERS & PALETTE GREMLINS gallery project.
This one arose from a splatter of paint while clearing out the last vestiges of color from an airbrush. I typically use scrap paper for that, which you can see in the example I fished from my wastebasket.
While working on something else, the scrap paper stayed in my peripheral vision. I kept glancing at it, imagining a distorted face with coral-like formations arising out of it.
Finally I gave in to temptation and took a few minutes to define the image I was seeing in my head a little better, using extra of the paint I had started with—a mixture of Liquid Carbon Black and Raw Umber [Golden paint company]. I scratched out highlights with the brush handle, later supplementing those marks with white and a touch of yellow off another palette I had going.
Source: michaelwhelan.com
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![MISTER RIGHT by Michael Whelan, week 17 in his gallery project LEFTOVERS & PALETTE GREMLINS.
This began as a loose, quick test of a brush-load of some sepia color [actually alizarin crimson mixed with sap green] on a scrap of canvas while I was...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/7063c31230914d5752d5db2c086a18a7/tumblr_o6dwqfjVpw1rklghko1_1280.jpg)
