The downside, of course, is you work without pay, or at least no guaranteed pay. Occasionally you can see that the image you’re doing might make a good print or the original might be saleable. Other times your personal muse might lead you to paint something with no purely commercial value. It might be a good reflection of your abilities, and may even make it into your portfolio but may not be the sort of thing the average person wants on his or her wall. Or, it may be more artsy still and have few practical uses outside of the fact that you enjoyed creating it. Or, it may be a completely different genre or style and so not marketable without special effort. I’ve done all of these kinds.
Due to scheduling, it usually happens that ideas will pop in my head for personal pieces right in the middle of a string of deadlines, when I can do nothing about them. Over the years it’s worked out that personal projects end up with an average gestation period of about 5 years. That that many years later I’m still interested in the ideas enough to paint them speaks volumes about how important such works are to me.
Yet, in the end, the idea often changes considerably. A few years is more than enough time to consider and re-consider an idea, and these changes are usually for the better.
Two examples: a popular early piece of mine, done in ’95 and called “Devilish Thoughts” was done for the centerfold of the Duelist magazine #9. I was essentially paid to paint what I wanted—a most unusual and wonderful opportunity. I was only two years into my career but it was a busy period and I hadn’t had much time to do work for myself already. So I reached back into my college sketchbook for a concept that I had come up with at about 7am while sitting in my parked car before class. At the time the character was just a shady looking character and he had, well, a lot more smaller horns. It was nothing more than a quick sketch, mind you, but it was even at that point about mood and lighting. That was probably about ’93 or so, so in that case the piece took a couple of years to be put down in paint.
Not long after doing it I figured it’d be fun to do a companion and opposite piece to it. This piece was to eventually become “Angelic Songs” and it was conceived with that title at that time. I bounced ideas around in my head for years but never put a single thumbnail down for it. A few years later I decided I liked the idea of spoken words being painted on the piece, as appears in some medieval annunciation pictures and the like. No idea what it'd say or anything else, and still no paper evidence that the image existed in my head. It wasn’t until early 2004 that I finally sat down one day and forced myself to spill onto paper some of the images that had been sitting in my mind, waiting their turn. I then forced myself to paint it—to the same size as the earlier piece—again, without pay at the time. It’s made a successful print, was accepted for a Spectrum annual, the original sold, and in the end was well worth the effort.
Figured this was as good a time as any to show this pic I snapped of the painting in-progress.
I’ve got a small collection of sketches and even color studies for pieces I may never get to or may lose interest in eventually as newer ideas take the spotlight. It’d be wonderful to be able to do a few of these per year if they were as successful as Angelic Songs has proved to be (it’s now being published as part of a product called Angel Quest later this year). I’ve started, recently, making more efforts to at least record thumbnails of various images, pieces that have been floating in my head for quite some time. images that in some cases I know I won’t attempt painting for a few years still. The painting currently on the board is one such piece, conceived about 2-3 years ago and finally seeing its turn. If it turns out alright you’ll be seeing a step-by-step in the next few weeks.
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