Dia de la Abby #78: Stacked Skulls

Inspired by the connecting Olympic rings, and pop art, I created this painting to play with angles and colors.

If you quickly look up the Olympic rings, you will notice the colors and stacking I chose doesn't exactly match up. Instead of a black skull for the black ring, I chose orange. I flipped the position of the rings, because stacking skulls that way, didn't make logical sense to me. I sketched out the skulls with pencil on watercolor paper, with the aid of my handy skull model. I used five colors of acrylic paint for the skulls, with black and grey for the surrounding area of the skulls. I used only black to darken, and white to lighten the colors. The pink turned purple, yellow turned green, and orange turned brown when darkened. I think my black must be blue based for this to happen. The rest turned out normal...green turned darker green, and blue turned darker blue. This took about 6 hours to complete, with breaks for my back, since leaning over painting for several hours hurts my back. The lighting source went from natural to lightbulb, as the hours passed. This was a fun one to do, as it caused me to experiment with shading and highlights, as well as angles of the same object. I'll play with this some more in future paintings.


On Thursdays in the 6.0 year, I will post my own Dia de la Abby creations. On Thursdays in the 4.0 and 5.0 years, I posted my Dia de la Abby creations and occasionally tutorials with instructions on how I made my pieces. Hopefully you feel inspired by my posts just as I was by Noah's Skull-A-Day 1.0 daily project. Want to find me elsewhere, follow me on Facebook, my Blog, Google+ and/or Twitter.