Location: Index >> Special Features

By: Skan

Introduction

I have been asked many times, “how do you come up with all that detailed chaos in your work?”.
Well, today I am going to share a bit about how chaos and randomness make it into my work.

Let me start by making this really clear; nothing I do is truly random. Even when a painting looks very complex, the chaos you see is actually thought out and designed. I just controlled the painting so the viewer feels it is random.When I paint, I can see random shapes, in random objects. But, I manipulate it as I paint so the viewer can make sense of what I am doing. If I were to paint real randomness, by the time I am done, the viewer would not be able to understand what I am showing.

Recently, a friend introduced me to a program called “Alchemy”. Alchemy can quickly generate a lot of interesting forms. You can download and try it for free here at http://al.chemy.org. Using Alchemy, I'll explain how I go about controlling and organizing the chaos and randomness in this painting I did for a magazine cover.

For the Magazine cover, I decided to do a painting of the Fire Naga, a mythological snake / monster from Thailand.

Step 2

I start with preliminary sketches to get things started. When sketching, I nailed down the design of the Naga, along with the rough composition.

Step 3

I used Alchemy to generate some rough ideas using shapes. All these are just used to get me thinking about the composition and the flow of the piece. My mind then starts to make sense of the shapes. At this point I already have a pretty good idea of what I want to achieve.

Step 4

After looking through the pieces I did in Alchemy, I choose and cut various parts of the pieces and used them to match the composition of my first sketch in Step 2. It may still look chaotic, but at this point, I am already in full control over the entire flow of the image. At this point I already have a pretty good idea of what I want to achieve.

Step 5

After that, I proceed to add a suitable color scheme. For this piece, I chose to use strong reds, as I wanted to bring out the “fire” element of the Naga.

Step 6

Next, I start to control the value by roughly blocking out the basic shapes. Also, I start to pull in the viewer's focus by distributing the level of detail with some fire elements

Step 7

From here on, I just continue to polish and refine the painting. When I get the entire design done, not every element I generated from Alchemy stays in the painting, only certain parts that flow and support my design are kept. As the first read is very important, I must make sure the viewer understand my painting, by cutting off the elements that is in conflict with my overall composition.

Closing

Here is a closer look at the final. I hope this shows there is no randomness in what we do here. The most important thing is to remember, that even when something seems random and chaotic, its all organized chaos.