Fight, Flight or Film
For almost four years I have been taking drawing and painting classes at the Watt's Atelier in Encinitas, California. Before then I had no idea that this highly regarded art school was pretty much in my backyard. People from all over the world go here to learn. Classes range from portrait and figure drawing and painting, landscapes, animals, and more conceptual ones as the Composition and Staging class I took in 2024. Media used in all the classes mostly include graphite, oil, and gouache. For this class I chose digital painting in Procreate on the iPad.
The class was taught by Erik Gist. He creates art for Marvel, DC Comics, Disney and others.
After some thinking I decided that I wanted something recognizable in the San Diego area and settled on a sea monster attacking the Coronado Bridge. It’s a famous landmark that connects San Diego to Coronado over the San Diego Bay. At its highest point it’s 200 feet above the water so that tall ships can still reach the farther parts of the bay. Because of its height, many people are uneasy driving over the Coronado Bridge. Some go so far as to detour through Imperial Beach to avoid it.
The next part of the class was to create a few quick sketches to get an idea for the final composition that would be rendered fully in detail towards the end of the class. I came up with these:
It is pretty much impossible to get a good reference photo of the bridge with my drone for any of these views, as there are many restrictions in the local airspace, so I decided to use Google Earth to get the view I wanted. I liked the view above the best, but I needed a little more space of the road so I could paint in the chaos that would unfold on the bridge:
Happy with this view, I started sketching.
I drew the monster as a large snake, with a large frill behind its neck, kind of like the chlamydosaurus kingii.
Now it was time to come up with some scenes happening on the bridge. I figured that these days, at least one person would stop to take a selfie while chaos unfolds in the background.
However, I wasn’t too happy with this result. Fortunately, our teacher Erik mentioned that he regularly uses himself as a model for his paintings. So I asked my wife Marie to model for the crazy woman who would stop on the Coronado Bridge to take a selfie with the monster in the background. Marie had the brilliant idea that she would also hold our dog in her arms while doing that! In order to keep more or less the correct perspective I climbed a ladder and took some pictures of her. Then, I thought, I can take more reference photos of myself and our daughter Kate to create some additional scenes:
All of these made it into the painting, including a few more of Kate exiting and running away from the car. I also pretty much shot every car in our neighborhood, which also made it into the painting.
In the end I changed the monster a bit. I removed the frill and added lots of teeth. Somewhere sometime I saw a monster with many irregular teeth and gave that to mine. And finally, for some interesting lighting I chose a sunset. This not only adds some warm colors to the sky, but it also provides long shadows throughout the image. The light is warm on the sunny sides and cool on the shadow sides. Kate came up with the title.
From June 10th to July 5th, 2026 a framed 16×24” print of “Fight, Flight or Film” will be on display at the San Diego County Fair Fine Art Exhibition at 2260 Jimmy Durante Blvd, Del Mar, California.
