It's Not Finished.................... It's Finished

Well the elephant is finished. It was taken away at 8am on Monday and I then proceeded to get back into pyjama bottoms and spent the rest of the day watching Battlestar Galactica and tidying my room. Heavenly. I also made a long list (on the back of an envelope, the best place for important notes) with as many of the things I needed or wanted to do as I could remember.

I meant to write this entry on Sunday night, then Monday but I was so knackered that only on Tuesday I got round to starting it and I quickly abandoned it for more Sci-Fi and some of the more visually orientated tasks on my list. Surprisingly I find the writing as tortured as it seemed when I wrote the first draft is not as awful as I feared, although it still contains much rambling and non relevant material. But isn't that what a blog is meant to be at least in part? I should know better than to watch the same programme all day, my mind will become inevitably obsessed with it and I won't be able to think of anything else except plot twists and character profiles until I have exhausted my supply of it. So while now I am pretty clear of it, back when I was trying to write this the first time I was having to battle my brain to think about art.

Hmm, lets get back to the point of this entry.

So the last two weeks of painting the elephant have been hectic. I have been getting up at 6am in an attempt to start work at 7:30. In practice this has ended up more often with me hitting snooze twice and then not starting till 8, but it's not bad considering. Actually the sheer length of my day from 8am to 6pm reminded me a lot of the last few months of University which is not something I have had to do (and enjoyed) since then. While it was immensely stressful (one can have too many dreams about the elephant getting lost, destroyed or coming alive) it was also extremely focusing and turned into quite an obsessive exercise. However the stress was intensified by the unknown time factors including; sections of detail that took far longer than you would have expected or sections that you expected to take ages was done in next to no time. It made working out how long certain elements would take impossible to guess. It also made when (or even whether) it was going to be finished change on a daily basis. In the end he was finished at about 10pm on Sunday which considering what could have happened wasn't that bad at all.

Ahh no matter! It is done now and I'm pretty damn pleased with him. There are still aspects to him I think I could have done better, but isn't that always the case? Plus he came together as a coherent whole which, considering that I was working from drawings and an image in my head on a 3D and (to say the least) unusual surface rather than a photograph on a flat canvas as I am used to, was wonderful. Oddly I wasn't even that wrenched to see him go. The studio has space in it again and I was glad to have it all finished. I'm looking forward to seeing him in situ more than I am sad to see him go. In fact strangely enough it was my mother that was most upset to see him go. Go figure. Apparently she's going to miss seeing him stare from out of the conservatory at her in the mornings.

Below is an image of the both of us together, taken when the men came to pick him up. I'm not sure what possessed us to have him facing backwards but it was at 8am so maybe me and my Dad were still half asleep. There are a ton of other photos on the Flickr set I made for him here is the link.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/noblueskies/sets/72157623599724090/

PS: You get geek points if you recognise and laugh at the title.

(I think I used too many brackets in this post)