Sticky Situation

The development of my ideas for a sticky situation started with things like syrup, spider webs, glue and honey. But since I couldn’t think of anything extremely creative to paint, I decided to literally take the word “STICK” and paint it. The Satanic Leaf geckos came along when I saw some pictures of them on twigs and branches. Thinking that they were the coolest thing ever, I decided to do my project off of them… later to find out that satanic leaf geckos are not the coolest thing ever, especially when you have to paint more than one!  Reptiles and amphibians are challenging for me to convey in paint. The art theme we had to incorporate with this sticky situation project was “repetition”, which were the sticks, leaves, and geckos.

 The amazing part of the Leaf Geckos is that their tail is literally a leaf, great for hiding from predators and camouflaging into the environment. Most of the leaf geckos come in different shades of brown, giving me a lot of elbow room on what shades of brown I could use. One of the most challenging things I ran into was brown, the color and the shade. This was the first art project I have ever done where the mid-ground and for-ground are the same color. Whenever I started on a new leaf gecko the brown from the previous lizard would never match the new one, so I would cover the old one up and start over. The problem with that was soon for most of the week I was re-painting geckos that I had already finished because they didn’t match. After a week and a half of painting and re-painting lizards, I realized that the geckos all looked different! So my paint colors didn’t all have to be the same…sigh. This project challenged me to paint the darks dark and the lights light, which sounds easy but I am reluctant to add a glob of white or black to any of the geckos.    

 

The important lessons in this project that I learned was that geckos are hard to paint, and don’t get such a large canvas.