way down

So I've finally, finally been able to complete a new painting! This is Way Down in the Valley, a kind of spiritual successor to The Valley, which I completed a few years ago. It has the same elements, double portrait with skullheads, but this one is, um, better. 

These figures started off looking like this. Why would I create extremely detailed faces just to cover them with skull paint, you ask? Because I am quite out of my mind, obviously. But from a practical standpoint, it looks better. After all, if you apply face paint, you're applying it to a preexisting surface, full of color and texture, which will inform what the end result looks like. So that's what I did here. I created the faces, and then applied the makeup on top. Which I essentially explained in the last post. 

There's also glitter. I haven't used glitter in a while, which is a shame because glitter is singularly fantastic. 

The idea behind this painting is the same as the idea behind The Valley; it's about true love, and how loving someone truly means accepting the darker aspects of their person, going down into the valley with them and accepting the fullness of their personality and psyche, not just picking out the parts you're comfortable with.

an artist you should know: Sarah Joncas

 After shirking my "Artist You Should Know" duties for a long time, I bring you Sarah Joncas, whose work falls under the pop surrealism category. Using oil and acrylic, she creates complex, multilayered images of women, evoking several emotions at once, while still retaining a unique stylization. Often her work encompasses several styles, including pin-up, classic portraiture and painting techniques, and graphic elements. Her work can be slightly uncomfortable, and she plays with the traditional ideas of portraiture, femininity and beauty. I currently follow her work on deviantART and Facebook.

So! Here's a small sample of her work. From the top:

After Dark. This moody portrait reminds me of the other, unseen side of a classic beauty queen, lying alone in a darkened room, still wearing her dress and pearls. It's a quiet, contemplative moment that may also be a little morbid. 













I Think I'm Paranoid. I love the bold, graphic patterning here, especially in contrast to the more delicate elements of the figure and the moths. I also like how it's worked into the figure, making it seem as though she's blending into, or emerging from, the wall behind her. It's ostensibly a cheerful pattern, but in this context it's jarring and frenetic, adding to the sense of nervousness. 


 



I Think, Therefore I Am. She reminds me very much of kitschy, '60s-style housewifey goth, like Morticia Addams, complete with little cartoon bat wings accompanying her lightbulb. Her apprehension is palpable.



















It Became Courtney Love. According to the description on the dA page, this was originally intended to be a picture of Norse goddess Freya. But now it's Courtney Love. I kind of couldn't pass up the opportunity to have a picture of Courtney Love here, because I do appreciate her so, but I also like the vulnerability in the face. 


















The All Seeing. This is one of Joncas' more overtly surrealistic pieces, sort of a mashup of mysticism and pin-up girls. I feel like there are many interpretations that could come out of this image, with the eyes looking very flat and painted on (which of course they are, but in two ways), the fact that the figure is covering her real eyes, and the confusion as to what, or whether, she can see.















The Crow Charmer. It's similar to The All Seeing in its mystical element, but this one seems more traditional, calling to mind nature deities and animal familiars. While the pin-up style is still very evident, there's less modernity in this one, and the figure seems more sure of herself, surveying her dark realm.

how to avoid having people try to talk to you

 Fangirlism has reared its ugly head once again, and I found myself with a new host of Jeff the Killer crap. Most of these were drawn on the train going to and from work, and I can tell you that drawing things like this is a great way to ensure that no one will sit next to you. 


All of them are Micron pen on some kind of non-special paper, all are about 3 X 5 inches. All were drawn on whims based on stupid shit I thought was amusing in passing. 


From the top: 


Jeff after a shower. He's a grimy dude most of the time, sleeps outside and often can be seen with dirt, twigs, dried blood and bugs in his hair. But occasionally he likes to clean up a bit and comb himself. That girl there might be Jane the Killer, who stars in an even less well-thought-out Creepypasta than Jeff, if that's even possible. Or it might just be a self-portrait.

 Coffee. This is the closest to the original image that I've ever drawn. Which isn't very. But check out that lettering fail. Lesson learned: Do not attempt lettering while on a moving train.

 
 Jeff and Jane (or whoever) again after a bout of stabbing or whatever it is they do to express their feelings about one another. The plants were fun to do.














 



Jeff drools. Jeff doesn't particularly care about his drooling problem, even though it's gross; he considers it a minor price to pay for his beautiful smile. The spiral there reads "smiley, smiley, smiley, smiley," because that was the song that serendipitously started playing on my iPod while I was working on this. 















 


Jeff goes hunting. Now, obviously, a knife has several advantages over a gun, especially if you're a serial killer. It's quiet, it doesn't require reloading and is easily cleaned, repaired, and concealed. But when a bunch of squealing fangirls are let loose in a nature preserve for an updated version of The Most Dangerous Game, Jeff prefers something more dramatic.



















Jeff vs. Robert. If you've never seen Rubber, you need to. Basically, Jeff would not win this confrontation.


















 
Finally, this is just inappropriate. And the sad thing is there's an even more inappropriate one waiting to be uploaded. Seriously I need help. But this is something that actually happens regularly, when certain significant others wake up in the night and peer creepily down at me for a few minutes and then have no recollection of it in the morning. It is so creepy. 

knives

So I'm shirking my "Artists You Should Know" habit, but my brain is somewhat fried and I already know what to say about this piece, which I banged out on a whim. Next time.

In the meantime, have this.

I'm calling it With A Knife With A Bigger Knife, which comes from one of my favorite moments in The Venture Bros. It's oil, leaves, pen and bloody tissue on canvas. Yes, it's real blood, but it's not mine. And yes, I know using bodily fluids in art is very "art school," but at least it's not period blood, so that's a start.


I used acrylic gloss medium to glue and seal the tissue down to the canvas, which caused it to bunch up and shred a bit, but creates an interesting texture. Unlike my actual paintings, I didn't have a set plan for this one, and frankly I'm surprised that I'm pleased with the result, because usually when I don't plan ahead, it's a disaster.


I sketched out the portraits of me and Blood Donor in Micron pen, and doodled in some atmosphere and vegetal forms with oil, and applied some dyed leaves, again with gloss medium. 


Honestly? I have no idea about this one. 


I like it, I'm sure of that, but it seems to serve as kind of a place holder between larger, more serious pieces. It's a fairly straightforward double portrait of me and the boyfriend. We like knives. It was admittedly kind of a throwaway piece. It's very small, only about maybe 9X9 inches, and served as something of an experiment.


It's also thematically related to a larger piece I have planned, which will use the brown and blue color scheme, the double portrait, and a sense of the cycle of life and death (though this one is more death-oriented) and of being two small people in the world. 


The sad thing is, this is pretty much all I've been able to do now that I have a Grown Up Job which requires forty hours of each week plus commuting. The upside is that my commute is really nice, and part of that is the ability to sleep through parts of it; I take the train. The commute was actually, in part, what inspired the larger piece I mentioned above, as well as some writing. I've also taken a position as a contributor with an online publication, and recently got my first article published with them. So everything is pretty peachy on the "being an adult" front, but the drawback is that it leaves me less time for painting. Also, the access I had to a digital camera was again shot down by shitty technology, and so this, unfortunately, had to be taken with my iPod, hence the less-than-ideal image quality. I'm hoping to either get one or both of the cameras repaired and, if that fails, get a new camera. Although the prospect of blowing yet another paycheck isn't a welcome one.


And despite the knives, the blood was not acquired through any violence on my part. Today's lesson: don't try to shave when you're drunk.

experiments in pencil

So I don't normally use just colored pencil. I've had a box of Crayolas sitting in my desk drawer forever, and they've been relegated, for the most part, to the foundations of water media pieces. A long time ago, like back in middle school (which was over a decade ago, giving you an idea of how infrequently these things were used), I think they were used to flatly color in some bullshit faux-anime-style fantasy characters. Yeah. We're not getting into that. 

But I saw some colored pencil work online, namely this piece by a deviantART buddy (which is like, way, way more accomplished than mine here), and started to get interested. It helped that the figure pictured looks like Boyfriend. 

So what I've found after working with pencils is that they're just like watercolors! Just without the water. This is because with both media, you start with the lightest colors and build up to the darkest, with the paper itself serving as your white. It's basically the opposite of oils, where white and light colors are added last, as highlights. You can do that because oils are opaque, while pencils and watercolors are transparent. Make sense? Good. 

(Full disclosure: I cheat at water media by using white gouache for highlights, which is opaque. I can't help it. I'm an oil-painter at heart.)

The other thing is that I've been working on leftover scraps of Arches watercolor paper, which is wonderful for water media, but a bit rough for pencil, making it hard to get very fine detail. I'd like to try out a smoother paper and see what happens. I don't dislike the roughness, but I think I could get more out of a picture on a smoother surface. I have two other pencil pieces, but they were purely experimental and frankly kind of suck, so I'm not going to show them.

So yeah, I decided that for this piece I'd use my fallback subject of Boyfriend/Beast Boy and all his teeth. Yes, the size of his mouth and teeth are exaggerated for effect. But it's more about capturing the murderous rage personality. I've also been really into eyeballs lately, and capturing the correct shine. I've yet to hone the wet-shine look with pencils, as I'm used to just glopping on some white pigment.

Isn't he cute?

coming soon

 So I've been working on a few new things--mainly, two new things. And here's a sneak peak of one of them! 

Both pieces are oil on canvas, and for both I'm taking a very traditional figure-painting route, lots (and lots and lots) of glazing and attention to minute detail. I am really, really happy with how the eyes turned out. I spent a lot of time staring creepily into the eyes of friends and relatives to see how they look, where the highlights are, and how to create the sense of depth and texture in them. These are Neo Megilp glazes, but the painting will have some stand oil in it as well.

These photos are already somewhat outdated, as I've been working on these steadily for quite some time. I've lately been liking the sort of Renaissance-style approach to painting, with lots of underpainting and glazing, and a multi-step approach to creating the human form. Since skin is translucent, I feel it's the appropriate way to really capture the luminosity and depth of human flesh and faces--like the way light comes through the skin of noses and ears, and how the skin gets thin enough to see the blood vessels around eyes. I've always been impressed by paintings where, when you look at them, you know what the surfaces feel like, even though it's just mineral paste smeared on a piece of cloth. The Waterseller of Seville by Diego Velázquez is one that always struck me. Looking at it, you know exactly what those pitchers of water feel like; the one on the left is smooth, heavily glazed and somewhat hefty, while the one on the right is rougher, and cold from the water inside. You can feel the condensation on your hands. It's just amazing. 

Anyway, to get back to this painting, that's what I want to achieve, but with people. Oh, and I should mention that these faces are going to be covered by some skullhead makeup. Not entirely, I'm not masochistic enough to do all this work to completely mask it, but yes, they're going to have skullheads. So why am I doing all this work? Because it'll look better. Look, when you put makeup on, you have a face underneath. The colors and textures of that face inform what the makeup is going to look like, so it stands to reason that this would also be true in a painting. Don't look at me like that. I'm just being insane thorough. The skullhead bits are going to be a bit different from my older versions, though, lighter and more delicate and still leaving plenty of the skin on show. 

I can't wait for this to be done! Not out of impatience but out of excitement!

experiments in fabric

This is the newest in the larger-scale oil paintings I've been procrastinating working diligently on. This one is the largest, at 4 by 3 feet, and represents a few experiments. 

For one thing, it's painted on silk. Normally I work on printed cotton--stuff that I can find for fairly cheap at the local sewing supply store. I bought this piece at Mood Fabrics in the city and loved the pattern. Unfortunately, it's not smooth but has a sort of crinkled texture, which means that the painting has vertical lines running through it. Lesson learned: Buy untextured fabric. 

Silk, at least this silk, is also way more delicate than cotton, and so stretching it was kind of a pain because I was constantly afraid of tearing it, resulting in kind of a loose canvas. The texture also caused a it of a problem here because it allowed the fabric to stretch, but not quite evenly. 

This painting also features a collage in fabric. I had a bunch of oddly-shaped scraps lying around and thought to put them to good use. I think it turned out okay for a first attempt, though I think if I were to do this again I'd try to integrate them a little more into the composition. 

So as far as the painting itself is concerned, it's sort of a sequel to Big Wind, which I already think is positive in terms of its meaning, but this one is even more so. Look, renewable energy! And plump birds! Life is obviously good here. I was inspired to do something with wind turbines after looking at/reading about/writing about them so much for work, I decided I really liked them. They're so white and streamlined and smooth, so seemingly at odds with natural forms, and yet they manage to fit into natural settings so well. NIMBY might beg to differ with me on this, but I like them.

I've also noticed I'm becoming more atmospheric lately when it comes to skies. This isn't a great example, though, as I didn't want to cover up the fabric too much.  

(...also I don't like this new layout very much, Blogger. Why the small font so unreasonably small? Why are there enormous spaces between paragraphs?)