I went to the AFG again tonight and took my acrylics.  I bought these several months ago.  It’s an array of the cheapest paint that money can buy.  I forget why I bought a bunch of tubes of cheap acrylics originally, but they’re coming in handy now.  They’re much easier to transport than oils and I might even have better control with them.  It’s kinda nice that they dry in a few minutes and you can work directly over the dried paint.  With oil I’m constantly working wet into wet, which I find harder.

In other news, I’m getting increasingly busy at work and I think there’s an evil monkey in my closet who’s trying to kill me.  Here are the paintings:

I’ve been doing these really quick paintings from life recently. I’ll call them speed paintings, because it makes me sound like an asshole, and I like that. The first two of these are really big, like 40 x 32. The rest are done on gessoed 12 packs

Also, here’s a couple of life drawings that came out well from this weekend.

I went to the Austin Figurative Gallery to paint tonight.  They have a cool set up.  The front of it is the Blue Ocean Gallery, which shows beautiful hand-made furniture.  It’s an old industrial space where in the front is the gallery and in the back is a complete woodworking workshop and painting studio.  They get models and the deal is quite a bit like the AVAA, put down five dollars and paint for a couple of hours.

The atmosphere is much better at the AFG as opposed to the AVAA.  There are no senior citizens or smooth jazz at the AFG.  A much younger and hipper crowd overall.  Still a sausage fest, however.  I’d think that art would be a fairly gender neutral pursuit.  But everywhere I go it’s all dudes.  How the hell am I supposed to impress women with my skills when it’s all guys?

Amperesand donated some large boards to them, so my paintings tonight were 4″ x 2″.  That’s feet, not inches.  I’m not used to painting that large at all.  Most of my paintings are done on gessoed 12 packs of beer.  They came out fairly well.  I was surprised.  I took a photo of the paintings next to a Billy bookcase from IKEA to give some context to show how big they are.  It looks like the price of the bookcase has gone up.  I think I only paid $20 for mine.

So I’ve been neglecting my online presence in favor of my social life recently.  No More!  Pixels will bring me happiness.

Some people think that softball is a game.  I think it’s a game for men.  And women apparently, since I’m playing on a coed league.  But both the men and women are made of steel, and eat lukewarm lava.  This means we’re incredibly tough. The women certainly are as tough as the men. They are distinguishable only be their gravitating towards the catcher’s mitt as opposed to the softball bats.

I was playing left field. It was a Texan night. Hot and dry with the scent of far-off death.  The manaical howling of coyotes in the wilderness outside the ballpark promised to make the ride home interesting.  But this was not my concern, I was in the midst of the game.

It was the first inning, there was one out.  Their first batter had grounded out to our third baseman.  He was flogged upon returning to the dugout.  Their second batter came to the plate.  He was a large mute.  6′4 and of a girth to suggest he had recently uprooted himself from a redwood forest.  He had once known speach, but after committing a field error he had removed his own tongue in a formal apology to his team.

On the first pitch he hit a line drive down the left field line. It streaked through the air like a tracer round from a 5o caliber weapon mounted to a Blackhawk helicopter into the hull of a Somali pirate ship. I was on it. I ran at full speed toward where my battle-honed intuition told me it would land. I had estimated correctly. I had to slide to catch it, as it was merely a foot from the ground. As my leg slid across the burning Texas earth, I felt the heated rock lacerating my flesh as my entire 240 pound weight worked to scrape my skin into the ground. I made the catch. It was glorious. The other team could tell from my valor that my team was made of something stronger than they were used to facing. Their moral was destroyed and we won handily. Their team captain committed ritual suicide after the game.

Here’s some stuff I did in Maya a year ago when I was stumping for a job.  I didn’t get a 3d job, I got a web job that probably pays better than any junior 3d position I would have gotten.  I’m just putting this stuff up as proof that I’m not lying when I say that I learned Maya.  The idea was that I modeled a throne room then gave it a “good” atmosphere and a “bad” atmosphere. So here it is, the project that killed my enthusiasm for doing 3d for the past year.