A Dragon's Hoard of Shapes: The Making of “Resting Place”
- Halloran Parry
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
I was in the middle of writing something else when I got the news that “Resting Place” has been selected for inclusion into Infected By Art Vol 14*. This is the first time my work has made it in and I’m over the moon about it. So let’s take a look at how this painting got made.
I’m fascinated by people’s collections of things that “might come in handy later.” There’s a certain type of person who saves every spare cable they’ve ever received. Some people have a junk drawer of every allen (alan?) key they’ve ever come across, every extra screw, bolt, nail that they end up with after a weekend of assembling Ikea furniture. Some people have jars of exotic, hard-to-find spices they don’t use for 98% of their cooking. This is me, but with shapes.
I’ll be walking down the street and suddenly I’ll be overcome by the forms of, for instance, a traffic cone, and then there’s nothing for it but to pull out a sketch book and jot down a quick visual of whatever it was that got me so excited about a piece of construction equipment. Possibly while dodging traffic. In my studio, I have boxes full of old sketchbooks, and these sketchbooks are bursting at the bindings with drawing after drawing of almost-but-not-quite-recognizable shapes because “I might need it later.”
This particular collection of contours caught me completely off-guard in a hotel dining room. I was captivated. Obsessed. Something about the variety and clustering of non-repeating shapes. I couldn’t explain it but I had to draw it, so I had no choice but to sit there and drink coffee by the potful while I meticulously copied every branch and vine and twig I could see.
The sketchbook went into my dragon’s hoard of possible compositional futures, and then I forgot about it.
Cut to three years later. I was prepping for IX, trying to figure out what to do with a beautiful sea of green.
I went to my hoard for answers and I stumbled across this old sketch. It was like coming across a really nice bottle of wine I forgot I owned, right down to the agony of whether this is a “special enough” occasion to bring it out. But, as with wine, when I go hunting for a sketch and I find a really good one, that makes the occasion special. The only challenge was transferring the sketch to the illustration board.
Amongst themselves, illustrators are always swapping tips back and forth for how to do these transfers. Grids, projectors, printing out the whole damn thing and just mounting it directly onto illustration board, and so on. I ended up rigging up a webcam to my iPad and used an augmented reality app to do it all and I was high on my own farts for days.
From here, it was a matter of identifying the mood I wanted to get across to the viewer and finding ways to reinforce that mood. The combination of the color and the shapes reminded me of looking out over a calm lake at night. There’s something magical about that feeling to me, and I wanted to share that sensation with the viewer. I don’t need you to say, “Ah yes, obviously a lake at night” but I’d be happy if you saw it and said, “Ahhh, I feel better.”
In practical terms, this meant darkening and unifying the background so that it didn’t compete with the foreground. I also darkened and tinted the foreground a bit more blue, particularly at the top of the piece.
Finally, I wanted to drive home the “calm lake” sensation and give the whole thing a stronger sense of place. So, in went the horizon line, along with a lot of white sparkles that could almost be fireflies and some hints of their reflections along a still water surface.
The exciting thing about preparing for the future is that the future never quite looks like what you expect when it arrives. I would never in my life have predicted this painting when I sat down to breakfast years ago. I wasn’t even dreaming of going to IlluxCon, much less being juried into the foremost scifi/fantasy art annual currently in existence. I just added it to my hoard and forgot about it until the future happened and I had to hunt around for answers. Past me really did future me a solid, and I’m grateful.
Reader, may your dragon’s hoard serve you well this coming year, and may you remember to paw through it every so often to remind yourself of all the problems you’ve already solved in advance.
And if you’re in the Bay Area, cruise by the Livermore Library sometime during March to see this piece and its companions in the Light of the West show!
Cheers,
Halloran
* An illustration annual dedicated to the year’s best imaginative realism. It’s full of work by my heroes: people I’ve been admiring for, in some cases, decades. My work is side by side with the artists who inspired me to chase this dream in the first place. This is the first time my work has been accepted and it’s kind of a big deal. Volume 14 will come out sometime this year. You can see past issues here.
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Upcoming Events
My series Scenes From A Hero’s Journey (including Resting Place!) will be on display at the Livermore Public Library March 1-30.
East Bay Open Studios
Come visit me in my workspace and get a behind-the-scenes look at where all the magic happens.
June 6-7, 11am-5pm
2908 Chapman St, Oakland, CA 94601
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