Noah's Arc - Couples Cruises

Assignment: Merge animal and human forms into a painting

Category: Acrylic Painting, Portrait/Figure, Anthromorphic/Animals, Commercial

Tools: Stretch Canvas, Acrylic Paint, Painters Tape, Gloss

Technique: I actually spent a lot of time on this one. I was going for a really 2D approach with it, so I was very careful to lay down the acrylic background. I basically made the entire background with painters tape. XD

I laid down a series of lines with painters tape, painted the blue ocean with a good few layers, and then pulled the tape off for the clean lines. Then I laid down another series of strips of painters tape to outline the railing and painted white over it with a few coats, and then again pulled the tape off. And then ditto for the deck and the pool and the pool railing and the flag pole and the other parts of the ship.....Dood, this one took me forever.

Lastly I painted some graphic "animal/human" figures in the foreground.

End Result:

My big goal is to be a commercial illustrator some day and I realized that none of my projects up to that point leaned in any advertising direction. So I decided to turn this one into a graphical ad for a fictional company called "Noah's Arc Couples Cruises." lol.

Initially I had wanted to give the ad a bit of a 50's flat-graphic style and had intended to run over the whole thing in a brown tinted glaze, but my teacher and classmates told me to keep the color. I'm glad I did, actually. It makes it look more contemporary and easy to read.

On the marketing side, I wanted to exhibit my ability to make an ad "reach the largest audience" so I have the young attractive couple standing in the pool with leg upturned like flamingos, the middle-aged couple sunbathing like crocodiles on the deck, and the wise elderly couple in the foreground with tea (I was originally going to have them playing chess, but the chess board would have been a little complicated and damn I was sick of all that painters tape already ).

I hope the fictional viewers of the ad would be familiar with the story of Noah's Arc. I'm not religious myself, but even I know it. So I hope it's universal. If not, it's about a man who built a giant ship to hold "two of every animal" for.....breeding. So they wouldn't go extinct during a flood. I don't know if the animals found it romantic, lol, but I'm sure people get the point of the ad: "Become two of a kind with your partner ......and breed "

This particular ad isn't supposed to appeal so much to romantic emotions as to "logical emotions/associations" but were I to do a remake the ad, I'd probably ad more "love-y" emotions to the characters involved. I mean, the flamingo couple look passionate but the elderly couple look like they're sick of each other by now. XD Hahaha.

I really like the glossy glaze I used on it in person, but when taking the photo I again wound up with a lot of reflected light in the picture because of it. Sorry about that.