Interlacing 

(my first painting)

I called this piece "Interlacing" and it's about paradox :

- Wrestling vs. dancing.

- Misunderstanding vs. connecting.

- Frustration vs. love.

I wanted to express the paradox and complexity of human connections through the pose of these two people entrenched in a lot of passion and a touch of fight, flowing from one emotion to the other in an endless motion. I wanted to use this red/ orange color as it is my favorite: I like how red is also packed with paradox in the way it expresses love but also violence. War but also life. Anger but also health.

I wasn't sure what to paint at first but I knew I wanted it to be about the human form as this subject is a big favorite of mine. As I was looking for inspiration online I discovered the piece “Sunset Nude” from the artist @francorama and I was blown away > Go check out his work, you're in for a treat! : https://www.instagram.com/francorama/

The way he stylized the shapes in his "Sunset Nude" piece, his use of color and the way he sectioned the body parts were striking to me. I decided to reuse an old sketch of mine and to treat it in this style. Like a blend of my drawing and Francorama's illustration and it became this final piece I'm sharing today.

It was a very long process :

1/ Brainstorm sketches in my sketchbook then cleanup drawing in Animate 2/ Learning how to paint and which paint or pallet to use 3/ Building the canvas from scratch with Jay 4/ Recreating the digital drawing on the big 4 by 4 feet canvas (1m20) with the grid technique 5/ Learning which brushes to use, how quickly acrylic paint dries and how it affects the color (thanks Youtube for being my teacher) 6/ Matching the digital colors with acrylic (you can see in the pictures the many pallet I explored before finding each color) 7/ Figuring out a way to paint that won't leave too many strokes so the look of the painting is clean.

It was all very difficult but I have learned so so much while working on this personal project. Thank you @francorama for the inspiration!!