Here is a bit of a study which became its own painting.

The entire piece

The sketch prior to watercolour

Here are the drawing and watercolour layers building up.

This piece, which is in fact a digital watercolour study for a Singularity painting, has become it's own piece.

I always like to consider my 'studies' as 'done' pieces as well.

I think they deserve a Life of their own. However, the story behind this piece was that I simply was sketching out an idea for a portion of a painting I am still laying out when I realized I rather liked this section as is. In fact I even cut back the head sketch I had started (which at the early stage is more similar to an egg with some facial positioning lines) and felt this section would be an interesting piece in and of itself.

I like the idea that one sees the robotic arm but also a fleshy neck. Is it a robot? Is it a hybrid? Who can say. And my often addition of the Monarch felt like they were almost the subject of the piece. I began adding more and more, as if they were hatching out of her; they the subject, she the background.

When sketching and dreaming up these works I always have little narratives running through my head.

In this instance, as I sketched more and more monarchs, I began to think what if these beings are a sort of immortal, or at least very long lived; perhaps moving to them would take on a new meaning.

If one has all the time in the world and no place to go, would standing still contemplating for days be a normal action?

I liked the idea of it, anyway. This hybridized post Human post Singularity creature, standing about in her finery, wondering at her existence and caught in a thought whilst caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly lived out their life stage. But, I digress...

As I have thought of this section as a finalized composition I will most likely do it in digital oils in this iteration as well. I will share that, of course, if it comes about.

Now, the other day, as part of my Hive account@sndbox required weekly posts, I shared this #antipost with you. I asked if anyone could guess what was the 'anti' bit of it. It seemed, in many ways, a post we often see here on Steemit, a few generic royalty free images (though I confess to altering the first image, I couldn't help myself) and the text sort of went on about this or that.

It was Hive account@ruth-girl who came the closest to what it was I had done, when she said in a comment:

BTW, I can hardly understand a whole sentence in here. My brain needs a break 😥

This was very astute of her, for what I had done was used this programme, developed in the 1990's, that became the center of a bit of controversy. The Sokal affair or Hoax was an attempt to route out the ridiculousness of the level to which graduate and phd papers and so called literary journals read or accepted submission. In other words, a piece peppered with many 'high handed' words would pass as a well written paper or article by a person.

It was Alan Sokal who was behind it, a physics professor at NYU and UCL. He did this as an experiment

to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions"

Sokal accomplished this with a programme that would randomly generate scholarly articles completely by a computer. Thus, I used this same programme and got a paper and simply cut and pasted the beginning of it into my #antipost, peppering it with easily found royalty free images. The point is, this could easily stand as a real post by a human. True, I did cut and paste it and added the images, but this concept of things simply being created by a machine also ties in nicely with my post Singularity concept in my paintings.

We live in a world that is quickly increasing in computer power and mechanized production. The level to which a programme today could generate anything from fiction to high brow papers including images is very possible. In fact much of what we see as 'news' today is often done so. And if anyone were to pay attention, the various language across the board of 'news' programmes today, despite their 'political' bent have an eerie similarity to them.

Thus, my #antipost was 'anti' in that it was meant to be made by machine not man.

We are all hurdling ever closer to a virtual and more mechanized life whether we want to or not. I hope you can enjoy today, but recall the world as it is now. Look at your flesh and blood arm and wonder, what will my grandchildren have?