This will be my second year having a piece in the Annual BordoBello Art Show in Denver, CO. This year will mark BordoBello’s 5th year helping the arts community by raising funds that will go to AIGA Colorado’s mentorship opportunity. The event brings together talented artists and designers as they create works of art on skateboard decks that will be auctioned off at the event held Saturday, October 6, 2012 at Denver’s Redline Gallery (Located near 23rd & Arapahoe). Some pieces will be selcted to be auctioned online as well.
This year they have offered up various styles of skateboard decks, from the modern popsicle stick style, the oldie cruiser sidewalk surfer style to the old school 90’s “fish-like” shape, which is the one I chose for this year’s piece since it offered a bit more real estate than the others and I still had no idea what I was going to do until the week it was due of course.
This time around, I wanted to deviate a bit from my other skateboard art pieces where I really used the deck as more of a traditional canvas and painted something on it as if it was. As I sketched my idea this year, I wanted to really make the overall deck as much as the art piece as what I was going to paint and to do that, it would require some manipulation of the deck.
My Process (if you care):
I threw an idea down on paper sketch with a rough template of the deck shape that I traced from a photo of the deck. For some reason, an Octopus came to mind, perhaps inspired by the shape of the deck or from watching Sharktopus vs. Crocosaurus on SyFy, who knows.
I then transferred the sketch onto the deck with a pencil referencing the paper sketch.
At this point, I knew I wanted to carve the deck a bit and I planned on taking a jigsaw and cutting the outer perimeter only, but as I started cutting, it went a bit smoother than anticipated, so I decided to cut the interior sections and knockout those pieces.
Now, I had what I thought was the hard part out of the way and could start painting. It was a bit of a challenge to decide on the pattern and color choice for my octopus as octopi come in such a variety of color schemes, plus some species can change their appearance as they desire. As I searched octopi, the Blue Ring Octopus kept coming up as a result. And their pattern is striking and beautiful. I chose to go with the Blue Ring pattern, but I wanted to stylize it a bit more from their traditional default tan body and blue ring colors, so I opted for a reddish base color to really make the blue rings pop and add a bit of variance to the piece.
The following photos show the painting process, which turned out to be more challenging than the cutting. It got pretty time consuming as I kept having to tweak some of the pattern and layering as I went along since I was kind of making up and stylizing some of the pattern and subject. I’m also a bit of a perfectionist, so that always adds a good 3 hours to anything.
Here is the final piece, hope you enjoy!
title: Octopush – Acrylic on Skateboard Deck – For BordoBello 2012
by: Patrick Hansen
(sorry about the glare, my bad photo)
Art Show info:
BordoBello Art Show
Saturday Oct 6, 2012
6p-10p
tickets $15 presale, $20 at door
BUY TICKETS
at Redline Gallery
MAP:
2350 Arapahoe Street
Denver, CO 80205
(303) 296-4448