Moon Goddess has really stolen the spotlight as far as my art projects go. Every spare minute I've got I find myself sketching for the project, working out potential concepts for the central characters of each painting. It just goes to show what happens when I find myself genuinely enthusiastic about a project; give me homework about baseball, then sure, I'll do it and I'll do it well. But give me a theme to run with and let me do whatever I want? Careful there, we wouldn't want anybody getting hurt.

I find myself collecting inspiration and references obsessively. As of right now, my inspiration folder for the project has 165 files. A good portion of them are fashion (there's now a healthy dose of headdresses made by the talented artisans of Etsy) but I've also been pulling images from old favorites including Mucha, Amy Brown, Jessica Galbreth, and believe it or not, a few of my own old pieces. This project has really been drawing me back to my artistic roots-- from the artists who first inspired my imagination when I was a teenager, to the layering of patterns and textures that I practiced in my work all the way through my senior year of high school.

But let's get to the point. I've been trying to raise the level of craftsmanship in my sketches for the project, in case I decide to do more with them in the future (which includes anything from turning them into paintings to selling them). That means they're slower going, but I'm not terribly worried; what the final pieces look like is going to ultimately hinge on what I can scrape together for my reference shoot. I'll be contacting models in the next few days, and I'm hoping to pull together a collection of fantasy gothic costumes and props that I can use to give myself references I can build on. The sketches I've been doing have little to no hold on the final pieces of the project-- they're just nailing down the style and narrative. The real work starts after I've got my reference pictures.

Yesterday in the very short, small project meeting (meaning-- two other people in the group and me) I found myself struggling to describe exactly what I wanted the final pieces to look like. It's a very familiar aesthetic to me, because I've been doing it for years-- but describing it to someone else is virtually impossible, due to the level of abstraction inherent in the style. It made me realize that I really needed some comps to give people an idea of what I was going for. So this morning I finally sat down and fiddled with the few scraps I've got until they vaguely resembled what I want.

They're not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. They're low resolution, haphazardly done, and I really didn't give them the thought that they deserve. They're also no more representative of the final pieces than the sketches I've been doing. But they're one step closer to what I want to create, and hopefully, will give people a more solid idea of what the final pieces will be.

Thus far everything I've done on the project has been very well received. I think that as I complete the actual body of work, what we're going to be left with will be a real show stopper.

Moon Goddess Update 1