Description
Deepwater Dreams
May 1991
Book Cover – Oils on Canvas – [18″ x 30″ FRAMED]
Note from Keith: Every once in a while there comes a time that a request must be made, and no matter how it is phrased, that elicits a raised eyebrow from a model. This was such a case. I needed a shot of a girl on a dolphin, wet, dressed and posed as she is in the finished painting. So in order to get it right, I set up an exercise bike inside a blow up pool, in the studio. When the model arrived, I showed her “the set” and the drawing, then told her what I needed her to do. That’s when the eyebrow went up.
I was the epitome of consideration and warmed the water before I dumped it on her. After the initial shock she seemed to adjust to balance on the bike seat just fine. Unfortunately, the photo lights had the undesirable effect of drying everything under them out. Accuracy was paramount, so to assure it, I had to shoot her with a mister periodically. She didn’t like getting shot in the face much. In fact, after a while, her enthusiasm for getting the right photo reference faded. However, persistence paid off and I got what I needed … Being an illustrator can be so difficult sometimes.
Note: This is a painting that was named Dolphin Dreams by Keith (not named the same as the book it was painted for).
Another interesting fact … if you look in the art book [Kingsgate] (or at all the photos you find on the internet), you will see the picture has the girl facing to the left, but if you look closely at Keith’s signature in the bottom right corner, you will see that it is backwards. This is a photo of the actual painting, and you can see it should have been facing the other direction, but the editors printed it backwards in the artbook.
