Building a Painting: Adam Naming the Animals & the Appearance of Eve

In my work as an artist I am regularly asked how my large compositions are constructed. These complicated paintings take quite some time to design, and are for the most part not very spontaneous, except for the earliest lines. The first line in Adam can be seen in the large ellipse, which was essentially the swing of my arm and a paintbrush along the 6 ft. width of the canvas. I intended for Adam to be at the left of the ellipse and build animals within and around it, above and below.

Adam naming his fish was the first thing I drew on this canvas. Above is that section completed with paint.

The composition lines are intended to remain like a skeleton beneath all the added details, the structure that carries the eye across the painting back and forth, up and down. If you look closely, you will still see the ellipse. Although I do plan out the effect of detail and color on all the visual movement of the final painting, those first lines determine where everything will eventually be placed. In a painting like this one, it gets busy pretty quickly. Everything above the ellipse will be more distant, within it and below it will be in the foreground.

If you look closely above, Eve is already visible to the very far left at the edge of the canvas. Below is a close-up of that section.

Here she is completed with paint.

A favorite part of this painting is the ostrich with the dove sitting on his head. Below are the first marks of the drawing.

Some of my readers may recall that I once took a survey of what kinds of animals I should include in this painting. Everyone got their wish.

Well, almost everyone. A little boy wanted a dinosaur. I knew that no matter how deep in the background I put a dinosaur, it would look like one of the disaster movies. I had to tell the little guy that a dinosaur couldn't be there, because he would eat everyone. He was satisfied with no dinosaur.

Here is the painting fully completed. Adam Naming the Animals and the Appearance of Eve took 6 months to finish, and it was was the longest I had ever worked on a single painting until my most recent one, which is actually 3 panels to form one painting.

I will take apart other paintings so you can see how they were constructed in some upcoming newsletters. 

Thanks so much for reading!