I set myself up with a painting desk at home a couple of weekends ago.  Up until now I’ve been doing all my paintings on the go.  The main places I would do the paintings were the AFG, AVAA, various hobo camps, and The Varga’s House.  So I’m going to be branching out in subject matter now that I have a desk where I can set things down, like reference photos and paint brushes.  I should have done it months ago.

So what I have here is a painting from a photo I took in Montreal.  I was there in 2006 I believe for a conceptart.org workshop.  I was woefully unprepared as all I had to show off was an embarrassing assemblage of stuff on a dvd from a semester in animation school.  I had a sketchbook that was full of awful crap and showing that stuff to pros was fairly humiliating.

This was an attempt to get used to painting architectural stuff.  I’ve found the sharpie underdrawing technique works well for this sort of stuff as well as the figure paintings.  What I do is make a drawing on the board and thinly paint some general colors over the top.  The drawing still shows through so I still have the a guide for the rest of the painting.  I then paint more opaquely and cover the drawing.  I’m not too concerned with covering the drawing entirely.  If you look, you can see it showing through in places.  I’ve got to start experimenting with oil again and see if I can get this working.  I figure if I paint the first layer thinned with mineral spirits, I can do the same sort of thing.  Acrylic is just currently much easier to handle.  Once it dries, you can just paint over the top.

Here’s my entry to the 12 x 12 art box show that opens on the 5th.  It’s acrylic and oil.  I used acrylic modeling paste to make the texture that’s on the surface.  It was my hope that it would look like really painterly impastoed brushstrokes.  Instead it looks like ceiling plaster in a Quality Inn.  But, it’s covered in galkyd and shiny.  People like shiny.

It could be yours for just $100.  A little bit of Tom Britton to hang on your wall.  It’s preferable to a little bit of Tom Britton that won’t come out of your upholstery.

I’ve been doing some portraits lately and I think I’m getting a much better resemblance nowadays than what I used to.  I’m still using acrylic because most of my painting is done on the go.  But I recently set myself up with a desk and a table-top easel at home and plan to get reacquainted with oil.  I have a couple of tutorials, one by Shawn Barber and another by Coro Kaufman that have given me some pointers, so I plan to put them to use.

Yeah, so I spend a lot of time looking around conceptart.org.

Here’s some of my recent paintings.  I’m a little behind.  I have some more to photograph, but my 8 year old digital camera just broke.  I need to get a new one, but I haven’t gotten around to researching it yet.

And Here’s a couple of drawings from the AFG.

Hey all,

This is the stuff that I’ve done over the past few weeks.  The figure stuff anyway.  I tend to keep the drawings of monsters and decapitations to myself in the confines of my sketchbook.  So today I went to the AVAA for the first time in a long while.  I guess I’ve had stuff to do on Sundays recently.  Or been hungover.  Maybe I’ve been praying.  Whatever the reason, it was nice to have an hour for the paintings, rather than the usual fifteen minutes. I did the sharpie underdrawing again because I was curious to see what it would look like with more time to develop the painting on top. I rather like how these two came out. Jamie, who is always excellent, was the model.

Unfortunately my iPod shuffle died ten minutes into the painting session.  For the first part of the painting session I was subjected to some kinda Native American flute music.  For the second half I listened to half a dozen sixty year old women sing and hum along to the Forrest Gump soundtrack.  One of them would recount a memory of a song after each one.  They didn’t seem to grasp that’s why they were chosen for the soundtrack.  Maybe that’s why I haven’t been to the Sunday session there in a while.  It’s full of people who have unironic memories of the music from their youth.

I have a few weeks worth of stuff to post.  So I’m gonna just dump it all here.

I almost forgot about another bit of art I’m kinda proud of, my Halloween zombie makeup.  Wendy Sanders, a professional make up artist was kind enough to show me around a costume shop and make sure I got the good stuff.  So I put my paintings skills to the test and tried to make a realistic zombie costume this year.  I think it turned out well.  Nobody wanted to talk to me that night, so I guess it was effective.  Definitely gets the award for costume least likely to get laid in.

Well, I don’t quite have 30 paintings to post.  I photographed 28 last night.  So, I’ve been doing art, just not posting it.  I’ve been neglecting my online presence in favor of a social life.  Here’s some things I’ve learned about life in the last month:

• Women love duct tape pants.
• I find video games much less interesting than I used to.
• Jamba Juice is delicious.
• Eight hours is too long to drink coffee.
• Whiskey and water gives a mild hangover.

Oh, I’m going to have some paintings is a charity auction, Burlesque for Peace.  I haven’t picked out what I’m donating yet, but they split the proceeds with me 50/50, so I’ll give them something good.  A friend of mine sold something there for $400, so maybe this could be a good thing.

Here’s a few things I’ve learned about art this month:

• Use prismacolor colored pencils for underdrawing.  Because it’s waxy, it doesn’t mix with paint.
• Bruce Lee quotes about Kung Fu apply 100% to painting.  ” The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be.“
• Home Depot sells the best paintings surfaces.

Here’s the art.  I’ll make some of the highlights bigger and post the rest in a clump.

Somebody once told me that Marvin Gaye named an album the same as the title of this post, after a divorce.  The story I was told was that he recorded it so that he could pay alimony, thus the title “Here, My Dear”.  If it’s true, I think that’s pretty awesome.  I’m not going to do a search to try to verify the story.  Some things are better if left in the realm of myth.

So, this social life thing has been a bitch for my keeping up with updating.  No aplogies from me though.  It’s important to occasionally talk to women; not just paint them naked.  Both are pleasurable activities, sure.  Each have their own set of frustrations and pitfalls, but it is important to maintain balance.

I’ve been floating around the idea that in order to attract more visitors to my site, I may need to write about something other than myself.  This site sometimes get 5k spiders a day, so it’s being well indexed.  I think anyway.  So I need to type about more things of general interest to art folk.  Maybe the world at large.  Perhaps if I subtly work in keyword like “Michael Jackson autopsy results” or “Megan Fox nude” I’ll get a lot more traffic.  I’m not sure exactly why that’s a desirable thing, but it seems to be the thing to do if you have a website.

After a couple of weeks of doing shitty paintings, one finally came out decent.  There isn’t much resemblance between the model and the painting.  The model was actually really attractive and the painting is kinda puggish, but I think it has a mood.

I did a couple of drawings of my roommate’s dog.  I’m putting these up to prove to my friend Tiffanny that I do have a soul and can draw nice things.  Not everything I draw is demonically dark or has the foul stench of hetero-male sexual frustration.  Just everything but these two drawings of a dog.

So, I’m just gonna lay the rest of the stuff out here.  I’ve been doing some sci-fi sketches for a short comic book story I’m contemplating.  I also have a demonically dark photoshop painting to share.  So here it all is:

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted.  In between my last post and now I’ve taken a trip home and changed residences.  I’ve been busy and couldn’t find my camera for a while.  So I have a fair amount of stuff built up to post.  I’ve continued the acrylic paintings and drawing sessions.

So here it all is.  I’m just gonna lay it out here.

OK. Here’s my drawings and paintings from the last week. This is a fair amount of shit. Despite the gothy look of my latest painting, I swear that I don’t think that I’m a vampire, wear eyeliner, or carry around a vial of blood from my one true love.

I was pretty productive today.  It was one of the first Saturdays in a while that I’ve woken up without a hangover.  I went painting at the Austin Figurative Gallery from 1-4 today.  Then I went for a run.  Then I did web stuff at Café Medici.  They have a superior latté.

I may be harming the drunken artist image I’m trying to cultivate online with all this talk of running and lattés.  I’m going to have to stop before I reveal myself as the yuppie douchebag that I’ve become.  I need a 40.

I skipped the Faster than the Speed of Light fundraiser tonight because I got myself involved in a six hour portrait.  It’s been years since I spent this long on a painting, so I thought I’d see what happened.

I experimented a bit with the process.  I first did a tonal charcoal under-drawing, then painted over that with acrylic, then finished up with oil.  It’s a pretty good process, but I should have stopped after my initial glazing with the oil.  The features were much stronger in the acrylic under-painting.  Although you wouldn’t know it from my painting the model was actually very beautiful.

I also did a quick photoshoppery to it, to see if I could improve it.

So I started a new series of paintings.  They are called “Grocery Bag Paintings”.  They are called this because they are done on grocery bags.  They are very similar to the “12 Pack Paintings.”  The only difference is that the paintings are done on a grocery bag instead of cardboard from a 12 pack.  This has some advantages.  That the paintings are bigger is an advantage.  It’s a more comfortable size to work, and after I throw them into a frame, obscuring the fact that it’s a painting on a grocery bag, the bigger size affords a higher price.  That is, if I ever try to sell anything.

Another advantage is that if I go into a painting session with a bunch of grocery bags, as opposed to 12 packs, nobody feels the need to have an intervention.  Now, if anybody is considering an intervention, the answer is no, I don’t need one.  Because only losers quit.

Sunday there were one hour poses at the AVAA.  I took the acrylics and one of the paintings turned out really nice.  I think it’s the most successful painted portrait I’ve done so far.  I think the key was a fairly detailed under-drawing.  That’s something that 15 minute paintings don’t afford me.  Time for drawing.  Here’s the painting big, because I like it.

The rest are from tonight at the AFG, except one that was done the same day as the portrait.  I don’t like it as much so it goes on the slush pile with the rest of them.

This website is starting to look repetitive.  I think I need to spend some more time on something to make sure I haven’t forgotten how to draw.