Greg's Art Project: Sky Wizard

Earlier this year, Maria surprised me when I returned from a business trip to discover she'd repainted our living room, dining room, and entryway. As part of reworking the look of our living room, she also put a sign over the fireplace saying "Greg's Artwork Here." So for the past six months I've been contemplating ideas for a picture to potentially hang over our fireplace in the center of the room.

I've played with a bunch of ideas, but this is the one that has stuck with me the most. Back in 2001 after finishing my last original piece of art, I started another piece that I never finished featuring a wizard similar to the one in the above painting. It was an influence from another artist that I really admire, James Christensen, a fantasy artist who has painted similarly proportioned people. I latched on to the idea of the cartoonish big-nosed, long bearded wizard with no discernible eyes, and have sketched him in many different scenarios while bored in various meetings over the years. I decided even though I failed to finish an earlier piece, that I'd try again.

General Conference is always a great weekend for projects for me. 8 hours of watching church on TV requires my hands to be busy. In searching for a project to do I figured I'd finally try and start a picture that the mantelpiece has been waiting for since coming home from that business trip earlier in the year.

The one missing piece of the painting was the background. I had this idea of the wizard tying himself to a balloon, but couldn't figure out what he was floating over. I had some various ideas, but wasn't really sure how any of them would look. Then, while looking for inspiration, I found a recent Thomas Kinkade painting called "Tinker Bell and Peter Pan Fly To Neverland" and in the top left corner, making up less than 20% of the overall painting was a representation of Neverland that seemed to just perfectly fit the background I had in mind for my Wizard.

I took my sketches and the detail from the Kinkade painting and blended them together in my own picture. I worked on it from October 3rd through October 7th 2009. Each time I finished a drawing session, I would take a photo of the progress. I compiled the photos into the following YouTube video which shows a pseudo-time lapse version of the creation of the painting.