My Gordon Gecko painting gets some fame at the other end of the world !

Internet can sometimes be incredible. All the power of the world wide network has just shown yesterday its amazing power. A guy from Australia left a comment on my blog. He loved my Gordon Gecko painting and even put the picture and a link on his website ! Nothing unusual so far, but the guy is an artist himself and has invented some artistic concepts involving the hard notion of valueing art from the very beginning of its creation… I felt very much concerned by his artistic approach for two reasons : first, I am myself a man of financial markets (I am running two websites about stocks trading : sequoiatradingclub.com and and lavoiedutrade.com) as I work in a Corporate Investment Bank. Second, I have been thinking about a way to monetize art for one or two years as well.

So that guy is Anthony White. His concept, like all great ideas is basically “stupid like the moon” as we say in France. And like one of my friend always says, KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). He paints single paintings showing money digits (eg. $1) and sells them.

As surprising as it is, it sells at a tremendous pace worldwide.

Remember that young brit guy who sold pixels on internet (milliondollarhomepage.com) ? He became a millionnaire in 9 months (1$ a pixel). Yeah, Millionnaire. I don’t know if Anthony White is already a millionnaire but he certainly took the right path to it.

So what’s the point about all of this ? Well, first I am glad that somebody appreciates my work and my art some 10.000 kms (or so) away from here. Yeah, it flatters ego… Second, I did myself had a similar idea two years ago. Painting stock markets related art has been a desire for 1 or 2 years. I kept maturing the idea without getting started even though I saw very similar artistic concepts here and there :

http://www.moneyart.org (a company who created the Bank of International Money Art)

Tom Moran’s art at Tommoran.net ( a former trader who paints stockmarkets abstracts)

Mark Wagner’s art at smokeinmydreams.com (an artist who makes collages with real pieces of dollar bills)

Even if I thought the concepts are innovative, I am not a fan of contemporary art and I preferred starting some more academic painting (more rewarding from an artistic point of view, in my humble opinion). But creating some new art concept can be rewarding too. Both artistically and financially (well, if paintings sell of course…)

But now, all of this made me think of it twice. I do not wish to give up my painting work on Fantasy Art but stocktrading is a great inspiration for me and I wish to give it a try. Today at the lunch time, I wrote down several ideas I got 2 years ago and slightly improved them. I wish to start a series of innovative contemporary art paintings directly inspired from trading. I will start with a first series of 8 paintings to give a start. Today’s improvement ideas will follow on the next series if success is encountered…

Oh ! and by the way, if you got here from Anthony’s site, please leave a comment. And if you are interested in buying the Gordon Gecko painting. Well, it is not for sale, right now. But my attachment to that painting could be diluted in dollars… 😉 so you can email me at sequoia @ sequoiatradingclub.com

Stay tuned, as usual… 😉

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Painting the mouth

The biggest difficulty in painting is most certainly finding the right color again some time later after the first painting session. When you mix something like 5 or 6 different colors, you can’t tell for sure what exact amount of each colour you primarily miwed together. So you lose a big deal of time searching for the exact color you used the day before…

Well, I still managed to correct a few things and continue painting the face with the mouth. Not yet finished (disturbed by kids) but on the right path I think.

You can judge by yourself :

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Starting the color

Here we go for the flesh painting…

First was to apply a lavish of diluted orange paint.

Then I started painting a first layer which will be a good basis for upcoming work (that is really detailing the painting). The main difficulty will be keeping a uniform color of flesh between hand and face (especially if not done the same day).

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Working on Gecko’s features

Michael Douglas’ face has two specificities. His expression comes of course from his eyes. But He also has a specific mouth. The rendering of the paiting will strongly depend on the success of rendering his slightly falling lip and the intense look of Greed. 😉

Given the dark composition everything will be a question of shades. Tough work is waiting me… First step will be the preliminary outlining of features to give a strong basis for the upcoming painting. Outlining will be done with diluted Burnt Umber.

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Project 02 – Gordon Gecko Portrait

One of my favorite movies (besides of The Lord of the Rings and Conan) is Wall Street. Some of you already know my other passion is Trading. Financial markets. Market wizardry involving millions of dollars 🙂

Michael Douglas’ character, Gordon Gecko is a very inspirational character with many famous movie quotes such as :

“Greed is good”

“If you need a friend, get a dog”

“The most valuable commodity I know of is information”

More quotes here : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094291/quotes

I found the movie poster on internet and my eyes were caught by Michael Douglas. Very interesting. Dark character with sweet light effects. Yeaaaaaah……

Some Photoshop work in order to get rid of all the unused parts of the poster, big size printing, and here we go for a Gordon Gecko portrait.

First step was to use transfer paper in order not to lose too much time drawing the portrait on the canvas. This technique, which I did not use for the Elf Amazon painting, has the big advantage to keep the right proportions compared to the original.

 

 

Once transferred on the canvas, I used a 50/50 mix of Raw Umber and Blue Black Winsor & Newton Oil painting to paint the dark background. Not sure this is the right to do but well, I did not think it would be good painting the face first and then the background.Having already a dark background should allow me to have better skin tones.

 

 

 

Next step will be refining the drawing with some diluted burnt umber paint. After that, the painting itself will begin…

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