Okay, so! Look you here! It's a real live oil painting! I started this, oh, some months ago and finally finally finally finished it a few weeks ago. It took me some more time to photograph it, since all the lights in my house are yellow-tinged and I never see the light of day anymore thanks to work and the early night time of the Northern Hemisphere's winter. But I worked from home today, so I got to take this out to the alley and photograph it. The lighting was perfect, too (brightly overcast) and I didn't get hit by any cars. Success.
This is What Double Vein, 36 x 36 inches, and I think it's about inspiration but I'll get back to you on that. I'm beginning to notice that the Home and Medieval bodies of work are beginning to merge, resulting in these patterned, foresty places full of mysterious crowned and robed figures. Back when I established the concept of three separate bodies, I always had the hunch that they would, eventually, merge into one. I'm beginning to see the Medievals also absorbing some of the characteristics of the Trash body, which has been turning up in a lot of watercolor pieces. So this is all very interesting to me.
Lately I've been liking incorporating geometric shapes into images of more organic elements, so we have some trigons happening here, as well as some headpieces--I'm particularly pleased with the one on the left.
By the way, you can check this blog out on my sweet new website in the blog section.
Well, hello!
This is what working all the time and taking a class and trying to have a social life does to you. That, and the lack of sustained attention that unfortunately comes with the Internet.
Here are some new(ish) things! The first three explore a limited color palette, using ink and a bit of watercolor. At the top we have a forest spirit of sorts, and evolution of Beastie. Lately I've been liking headdresses, and his has typically been the bones of small animals. He's also been clearly affected by the aesthetics of Sword & Sworcery, with his trigon. This was done using India ink, red watercolor and some black gel pen for the details.
Below is a painting using much of the same materials, although I think there's some Payne's gray in there in addition to the red. The circles are vaguely Mucha-esque, and were created using a compass. The figures are a take on the medieval figures with their big black robes.
Next is something I thought of while listening to Grimes' "Visiting Statue" off the (perhaps aptly named) album Visions. I actually had a whole music video mapped out, but as I lack the funding and the willing victims participants to make music videos, I had to make due with a still image. The challenge of this one was to lend a thick, opaque, sculptural look using water media, as well as working on a gray ground. I started by coating a piece of (white) paper with a mixture of white gouache and Payne's gray watercolor, and layering more of that mixture until I got a good ground. Then I painted in the figures and the landscape, and finished with a mixture of white gouache and yellow watercolor for the constellations and circle shapes. I also emailed a copy to Grimes' fan mail, just for fun.
Finally, we have a painting with a more traditional palette. This came from the idea of the Manitou, an Algonquin concept of an innate spirit present in all things, including people, animals, plants, rocks and even machines. Specifically, it's a reference to Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron off the coast of Ontario, which means "spirit island." The image is just something that sort of popped into my head, of a big sleepy creature-island supporting lots of nature and people. It looks a bit sad, but it's really just sleepy. I'm really happy with this one, and I'd like to find a nice frame for it.
So, wow, it's been a while. Things are fine. I've been doing more illustrations for inconnu! Here are some of them.
From the top, we have an illustration for a break-up playlist, one for a piece on horoscopes and other pseudosciences, one for the magazine's "Hamlet week" of Hamlet being a creep (because I think he's a creep I don't care about his melancholy), and finally an illustration for a piece on digital aesthetics.
And look, circles! Circular compositions that actually work! Crazy! Although I maintain that circular pieces work best when small (these are no more than about 4 inches in diameter).
The Hamlet one was a lot of fun to do. I really enjoyed working on the faces. Because it depicts the play scene, I had to work out how to make it clear that the actors are, in fact, acting. So the sleeping king had be be a sleeping king but also a very conscious actor playing the part of a sleeping king. The false beard was fun, too. It also made me think about Hamlet as a play and Hamlet as a character. Like, what if the plot against his father was actually because his father was a bad ruler and bad husband, and his mother and uncle were actually in love, and his uncle was a better ruler? And then Hamlet, in his blind devotion to his father, ruins the rule of Denmark and ultimately paves the way for Denmark to fall under Norwegian rule. What if everything was actually going fine and then HAMLET RUINED EVERYTHING?
You'll have to forgive me. It's been a while since I've been able to discuss literature. Regarding the art, though, Hamlet seems to be an evolution of the blond-haired men in the "medieval" body of work.
The last one is actually the original draft of an illustration. In the accompanying article, it has an iPhone text background, so the final result was something of a collaboration between me and the editor. Also there are cupcakes--everyone likes looking at cupcakes and using them as a desktop or as decoration on digital devices is not uncommon. Who doesn't feel better looking at cupcakes?
All of these were created using varying combinations of watercolor, gouache, acrylic, ink, and gel pen. Gel pens are severely underrated.
Finally some oil paintings! Being separated from my oils is rough, I tells you.
These two are painted on 4inX4in wood panels, which were coated in gloss medium so the grain of the wood is still visible.
These are my Winterkins, created initially back when the weather was colder, and they're sort of like the embodiments of winter. I was inspired by the recent fashion trend that involves a lot of cultish, quasi-spiritual and occult elements, and the results have been sleeker, starker fashion choices for my figures. As well as a lot of triangles. It's a combination of ancient and medieval symbolism and designs, 1970s-style fantasy illustration, and the more naturalistic elements from my older work. The result is a lot of natural, complex details combined with larger areas of flat, geometric space, and is something I find really aesthetically pleasing.
They're also portraits. The figures are the same as those in The Universe, and are basically me, in black, and Beastie, in white, along with the things I've come to associate with each of us: trees and crows for me, bones and rabbits for him.
As for the process, painting on wood is fun. It's nice and smooth. The only downside is that because it's so smooth, it's easy to wipe the paint back off during the painting process if it gets built up too thickly. So these were made using a lot of thin layers and glazes. The other things about very smooth surfaces is that dust and debris show up really easily, so you have to be diligent about keeping them clean.
I'd like to do another pair for summer (the Summerkins), but I still have to work out their details. They will remain with the same color schemes, though some of the elements may change.
I've been listening to a lot of witch house, can you tell?
Here's some of the watercolor stuff I've been doing. I've lately been very into triangles, as I may have mentioned before. They started showing up on the throats of my figures, and I like how it looks, so we'll be seeing more of it. I've also been into occult symbols and the like. I've worked with them minorly before, but I really like what they add to an image--something like esoteric writing--and so I'll be using more of those, too.
From the top:
Priestess is the earliest piece here. She's pretty simple, done in watercolor, India ink and gouache. Her design was based on a combination of occultism and '70s-ish graphic/fantasy illustration, which used a lot of solid areas of color for a look that's simple and linear so it's at once streamlined and modern while still evoking traditional fantasy. So that's what she is.
The Universe is a double portrait, and done in a more detailed, traditional style. This was made using the usual mix of water media as well as some acrylic paints, which were watered down to the point of behaving like watercolors. I also used some interference paints, which add some nice iridescent details. I had a lot of fun making this one. The sky was made my wetting the paper and basically letting the paint go wherever (not too much, though. I'm too much of a control freak for total abandon) and then forming cloud/nebula shapes by shading and highlighting the resulting forms. The costuming was probably the most fun. I used to draw costumes all the time--when I was a kid I would have reams of paper with these bizarre fashion innovations on them--and then somewhere in college I started painting nudes because SERIOUS ART or something. But there's so much you can do with clothing. From a conceptual standpoint, it adds to the characterization of figures.
From a technical standpoint, it's a great way to practice a lot of textures. Here, I got to play with sheer fabric and fur, as well as metallic surfaces for the accents. Oh, and that's a dodecahedron on his brooch thing there. Hooray for Platonic solids!
Finally we have, um, this guy. Drawing a scantily clad man with a come-hither expression and a big fucking gun just sort of made sense one day, so here he is. This has more acrylic in it than The Universe, specifically the fluorescent colors that like to cause retinal damage but are fun anyway. I don't know where this came from, to be honest. I just wanted to do something uncomfortable on several levels. A friend came over and said that this picture "creeped him out." I said that if it creeped him out, then I did my job right.
I was terribly, and pleasantly, surprised to find that THIS is what it looks like when you use water media on fabric. I had tried it before with some small pieces, but it works really well on a larger scale, too, and can be built up to a decent opacity.
I was originally going to hang these on our closet doors at home, kind of a his'n'hers sort of thing, but the doors seem to be made of diamond and cannot be pierced by the pointy things of man. So they live on my desk.
Up top is some beast boy creepiness, complete with blood and pointy claw fingers. And a hair bow. I used Mod Podge to seal the fabric on this one, and I'm not sure if it was that or if it was just not stretched properly, and so the fabric buckled slightly. It didn't effect the outcome, really, but was not as pleasant to paint on. This is primarily gouache, tinted with watercolor.
Below is some fashionable witchiness. This one was created using gouache and watercolor as well as India ink, acrylic paint and gel pen. REMEMBER GEL PENS??? I bought some bright pink gel pens a while ago on a whim because they transported me back to seventh grade, where the cool thing to do was to scrawl all over yourself and your friends with smeary opaque ink. They made the finer pink branches near the bottom, and were fun to use.
So, they're not oils. Nothing is oils. But they were fun to make, and I got to play with lots of interesting ways to combine colors and materials. The only thing about this, which I discovered the last time I tried this, was that because of the primed surface, the paints will wipe right off if they get wet, so I might want to spray seal these sometime. Although, during the painting process, this feature actually came in handy as it served as an "eraser" of sorts.
I really like bright pink and I need to use more of it. I've also found I really like designing costumes and painting fantastical clothing, and will be continuing this trend.
Holy crap look at these.
These are different, right?
Technically, they aren't done. They were created to serve as backgrounds for figures, and are painted in acrylics (although the black is actually India ink), because as much as I dislike acrylics for most things, they are really awesome for a few things, like fluorescent colors and flat areas of color. They also dry quickly and are water-based, which means that oil paints can be applied on top. So these are going to be populated with some medieval-style figures doing mysterious things. As those medievals are wont to do.
These were inspired by the spiritual landscapes found in manuscripts like the Ebbo Gospels, which are 1,200 years old and incredible, as well as by landscapes in video games like Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery and VVVVVV. They are, I guess, kind of an evolution of Angelus, which was the initial endeavor into this concept.
Also I've been really into geometry lately.
I have, admittedly, warmed up to acrylics a bit. They might be fun to use as backgrounds for oil works, and they're nice to use like watercolors in washy, watery ways, too. The fluorescent paints (the pink and orange, in this case) are fun, too, but may cause retinal damage. The third one from the top was literally painful to complete.
This is the order they go in. They seem to have a loose sort of narrative to them, though nothing too specific. The narrative element will become more apparent with the addition of the figures. It starts with a vision, moves onto a meeting, undergoes a journey, and finds a solution--that's the basic idea, anyway. I prefer to leave these things open ended.
Currently, these have figures sketched out on them, but here they are in their pristine state. Don't look too long at that pink one, though.
I actually drew this quite some time ago, late one night while listening to this, when these four paid a visit. They seemed friendly enough, if not very talkative. They have, from left to right, deer, owl, crow and rabbit skulls, and I always thought of them as friendly guardians of some other plain of existence.
This is just pencil in my sketchbook, which I'm afraid is getting rather filled up.
So I moved! But that means that I have neither the space nor the ventilation to make oil paintings. It would be nice to be able to do larger-scale oils, but I can always take the train back up to Mom's and work if I feel so inclined. In the meantime, I can work on tiny little guys like these.
These are created using watercolor and gouache, which works out beautifully on the fabric. The fabric is mounted onto little embroidery hoops that I found at a craft store (SO much cheaper and cuter than round canvas stretchers). The ovals are 5 X 3.5 inches, and the circles have a 3 inch diameter.
So very tiny.
The ovals feature some kind of slightly mutated hoodie, now a bit frillier and more overtly feminine, and a mysterious wooded area. Maybe this is my subconscious interpretation of moving and going into the unknown.
The circles were a little trickier (you know how I feel about circles), and I was originally going to stick with the hoodie theme, but I went for animals instead. Owls and rabbits are some of my favorites, so here they are.
That owl looks kind of confused, doesn't it?
Anyway, I don't normally paint or draw animals on their own, but these were fun. These pieces are mainly meant to be decorative, and I was mainly concentrating on making something cute that I would continue to enjoy looking at, and their small size means I can put them in weird little corners.
The only issue? They need to have some kind of sealant, preferably a spray sealant, to protect the paint.
So, I didn't mention this because I don't like posting very personal things on the Interwebz, but my dog died in August. It was really hard on my mom and me. I didn't really want to talk about it with anyone.
But I made my mom this picture of Calypso for Christmas, with her big pink belly and her knobbly feel and big giant eyeballs. I was going to depict her engaged in an activity, but Calypso's favorite activities were killing rabbits and rolling in shit, so I went for a more traditional portrait.
Here she is.
