Fashion from another planet - first stages

I've been working on my next series of paintings for quite a while now, but it's only tonight that I've actually started painting them. The bottleneck has been deciding the size of the canvases, which eventually became 80x80 cm. I think 100x100 cm is quite hard to hang in most people's homes.

The idea for the series is 'Fashion from another planet' and was born as I jogged on the treadmill and thought about what I want to do next. 'People like animals' was a thought, and 'I like painting my wife' was another. So after a lot of thinking, I arrived at the thought: 'If you were an alien, how would you dress up for going to a classy event?'

These are my initial sketches, a little ipod-advert style (not intentionally) and very quick. I want to get away from the black backgrounds of my previous paintings, but keep the dramatic shapes and lighting.

One night I persuaded my wife to be photographed in different dresses which was difficult since our 3 month old son was still awake. It was a good session and some of the photographs inspired new compositions and ideas.

I cut and pasted various animal parts onto the photographs but realised quickly that they looked stuck on. Really what I wanted was parts that had the same lighting situation as when the photographs were taken. So I created tails, wings and things using some 3d software, with the same lighting as the photographs.

Once I was happy with the main subject, I played around with the composition, trying to get something dynamic and exciting. Here are some of the 'final' sketches before I start to paint.

My intention is to make the background an exciting texture, rather than just a thin flat colour.