The Three Bandits

This year has been quite the anxiety-inducing one, and the best way I know of for me to relax is to paint. I’ve always relaxed by drawing or painting for as long as I could rememeber. As a child my parents would just hand me a notebook and a pencil to keep out of their hair, and my family would gift me three subject notebooks for my birthday and Christmas. Truth be told they were as much a gift for my mother as they were for me. Today, I just paint or draw before bed to relax and empty my brain before sleep. I’ll work on the same image for months. I started on the one above in late April.

I had been struggling for a while coming up with an idea for a painting I could do, and I was just looking through random images. I ran across a photo of a gas station that was lit from above by a sodium vapor lamp with the scenery outside of the lit area being blue. I knew I wanted to do something with that kind of lighting. It just took much longer to figure out what the subject matter was going to be. I just came up with this idea of raccoons raiding a vending machine randomly.

I think I had the most fun on this painting working out the lighting, so much I introduced more light than would normally emanate from a vending machine, including the area at the bottom where the one raccoon is digging inside the machine for goodies. It sort of glows like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Another fun part was painting the labels on the snacks in the machine. They’re all mostly vaguely like real world products but yet not. Some are a bit vulgar, too. Of course!

The original of this image is 6136 × 8496 and would be about 24 cm. × 34 cm. when printed as intended.