gallery post category
The title of this series is a portmanteau of “pantone” and “fantanas.” The latter a reference to an old soft drink ad campaign. In September 2021 I dived into painting again by experimenting with image processing of nudes, textures, and colors. Although I started with found photos from the internet, it was satisfactory for what I wanted to do.
Continuing the ideas from the Pantanas series, I started a new series using photos I had taken in March of 2013. Sarah was my favorite model at the time.
After a hiatus of several years, I returned to painting in 2020. This series, using photos I had taken of Becca in August of 2012, materialized ideas that had been lying dormant for a long time. Bursting forth with burning flame.
During the first few years of painting in my pixel art style, I experimented quite a bit. One of the first things I learned was that larger paintings afforded more detail. I painted a dozen 40” x 60” paintings. I no longer paint this large unless it is commissioned.
Knoxville Storm Water Management had its annual rain barrel painting contest in May of 2012. A friend who worked there encouraged me to make an entry. I decided to implement a variation of a trick I invented for a student project at SCAD. I processed photographs and other images in Photoshop and reduced the color palette to a handful of colors. It was a slow, tedious process. But the results were eye-popping! It was sold at the charity auction. But a few years later, it eventually ended up in my possession, where it has remained ever since.
This was the original design that wrapped around the rain barrel. Each pixel represented one square inch. Matching pixel colors with paint was very tricky. I limited my palette to just ten colors. Over the years, I’ve refined my color palette to match paint mixtures perfectly. And I’ve increased the number of colors I use by a factor of fifteen.
