This is my piece for @juliakponsford wonderful contest #artexplosion which is this week meant to be any creative endeavour influenced by a book/books.
I have started using crops of my work for the thumbnail as it always crops it in odd ways. So, here is the work again as an entire piece.
I wasn't depicting a specific scene from a book, but my inspiration came from "Where the Red Fern Grows" which was a book I loved as a child. Being obsessed with animals all my life, I always loved stories that had animals and animal friendships in. SO, I suppose in a way, this is an idealized moment of someone enjoying the book in nature and the suspect her own dog is having about both the contents of such a book (spoiler alert the dog in Red Fern does not survive at the end) and also wondering how he has come to be an end table for more books.
I like to make my work have a touch of surreal. I like it to be grounded in a sort of normalcy but with a bit of whimsy or something just a little odd, here being the question, is the dog, himself, reading the book and finishing first, trying to get his owner's attention? Or is he simply a faithful bookshelf to follow his owner around? Who can say...well you, the viewer, can say. I love making up stories about the art I view so I hope it happens with my own work for others.
Here is a closeup of the female figure:
Here is the pencil sketch I made once I determined the layout.
I am still trying to understand how to make gifs. I spent some time yesterday trying to work it out but to no avail. Today I found I could just use this simple little gif maker to show the process of the painting. That is why it has that odd watermark in the gif, as it was made on a free online site.
I hope you enjoy my work and if you do please feel free to upvote, comment, and resteem.
