Greenhouse
So I have this children's book going on that I wrote waaaay back in the day based loosely off the Mother Goose world. It's not far enough along to describe anything more accurate, so I'll have to keep it cryptic for now. However, I have gotten it into my head that it would be utterly efficient and cool to have used a 3D modeling program to create the backgrounds of the scenes, not straight as renders, but as a "quick and easy" way to get the perspective while additionally having the flexibility to rotate and angle the scenes around until I get just the precise view I want. No muss, no fuss. I just model, screengrab (not render) and loosely trace, finishing up the real linework by hand.

This particular model is an old Victorian-based greenhouse for one of the scenes. This was just going to be the placement for the underpainting based on the thumbnail I created. Unfortunately, this turned into one of those paintings that was more interesting to create than to look at. By the time I got this far and nearly 75% of the painting done with foliage coming out of my ears, I realized something crucial: it sucked.

Yes, it does happen. Even when you go through the proper steps of thumbnailing and concept sketching and layout and placement and values, saturation, all that... There will come a time that despite seeing the bouquet for the petunias, a fundamental issue will get past you, sneaking like a third-rate drunken thief stealing bamboo windchimes through the bubble-wrap factory, having knocked over several hundred sheets onto the floor and delicately trying to stagger his way "silently" to the other side of the warehouse.

I mean, you heard the commotion long before now, you just chose to ignore it out of sheer unbridled denial.

So anyway, by the time he fell flat on his face, scuttering every bamboo windchime across the concrete floor into the chippershredder, one piece accidentally turning the damn thing on to obliterate the lemming-like flow of kami-kaze kin into such a massacre that no panda on earth would not pause and take shudder, I realized the monstrosity I had created and took old yeller out to the back yard and did what I should have done weeks prior.

But, as you can see from the model, its ghost lingers on. And at least it was a pretty ghost.

Monk Temple
So this was supposed to be an elaborate image for an art book publishing and the same thing happened to it as happened to the Greenhouse. By the time I got about halfway into the painting, I was so disinchanted with it because of the amount of effort and time I used vs. the deadline of my editor. It was a neat idea, actually, and I still might paint it one day, so I won't explain it here, other than to say it's not your standard asian temple and rock garden. ;} But as things go, it couldn't make the deadline for my publisher, so I had to scrap it and work on something more guaranteed to be completed in time for the schedule. Oddly enough, that turned out to be Catch.

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