Not much to say here.  More watercolor figure paintings.  Dig it.

I took the new iPad to figure drawing tonight. It ended up pretty well. I’m getting the hang of it. I’m definitely slower with the iPad than I would be with Photoshop and a Wacom, but it would be damn inconvenient to drag a laptop and a tablet around with me. The lack of pressure sensitivity sucks, but it’s just a limitation to work around. Hopefully there’s some shortcuts I have yet to discover that will allow me to more easily resize the brush and adjust opacity. Color picking works well. I’d say with some time, I should be able to bust out some good work with Sketchbook Pro.

Also, the dark sketchy drawing was done using a program called Harmony. It’s a program that runs in-browser in Safari using HTML5 canvas and Javascript. I absolutely love it. I’m gonna take it out behind the middle school and get it pregnant.

Thursday night I went to the Vargas house and painted a pair of boots.  An interesting thing about this painting is that I didn’t use any white until I did the background.  Interesting to me anyway.  Normally white is the color I use the most.  It wasn’t something I intended to do, it just happened.  Could have something to do with painting black boots.

These Boots Are Made For Stomping

Edit: Here’s Tiffanny’s rendition of the boots from the same painting session, a few feet to my left.

Watercolors?  We got em.  I was late this time because of terrible traffic coming down Lamar on my way home.  It was restricted to one lane for about twenty feet and this caused my trip to take about 45 minutes to drive four miles.  So I only have four paintings.  And here they are.

Master copies are good.  I haven’t done a lot, because I’m a lazy bastard.  But whenever I do, I always have moments where I think, “Ah-ha, that’s how you do it.”  A good instance here were the nostrils.  If you look at the original, you can see how warm he paints the nostrils.  This makes sense because the skin is thin and light shines through and colors everything red.  Think holding a flashlight up to your hand.  There were lots of very warm places, mostly in the skin folds.  I’m gonna do more of these, always a good art workout.  Anything you wanna see me try to copy and eventually throw cadmium red on top of?

Bougoureau Master Copy

Bite the bullet. Reduce, Reuse, Reload.

Reduce, Reuse, Reload

Tonight I went to the Vargas and painted a skull.  They’ve been doing a still-life a week for a while now with our friend Jay.  This is the first time I’ve joined them because every previous time I’ve been drinking or chasing a girl or something similar.  I hope to join them from now on.  I ended up coming up with a pretty decent painting from it.  Oh, and it’s oil.  Finally feeling a bit better with oil.

Jay's Skull

Tonight I brought out the oil paints again at the AFG.  It had been  a while since I’d actually done a figure painting.  I wasn’t sure I’d remember how.  It had been so long that when I got there my Gamsol was dry so I had not thinner.  This forced me to paint thicker than I normally, which I think was good.  It’s always good to do things a bit differently if you’re in a rut.  We had a single pose the entire time, so I had a couple of hours to work on this painting.

Figure Painting at the AFG

Hey all, thought I’d drop in and make a quick post.  I’ve built up a backlog of paintings, so I’m gonna clear out some inventory.  Thanks for your patience, as I’m sure there are many of you who’ve been patiently hitting refresh since my last update.

First up, here’s a couple of painting that I did a while ago, but never made it to the site.  Since they’re good examples of what I can do when I take more than 15 minutes to do a painting, I thought I should put them up.

I’ve done a couple more of those record paintings as well.  As with all of my projects, it has slowed down.  Somehow, staying home and working on stuff has become very difficult.

I did a poster for Animalesque, a burlesque show that is happening this Friday.  I also have a couple of paintings that I donated to their silent auction.  The money is going to a charity, Love-A-Bull.  I seem to be opposed to doing art for money considering the lethargy with which I approach any sort of monetization.

And here’s some recent AFG stuff.  I have several sessions worth of drawings that I haven’t scanned as well.  I need a better workspace.

And lastly, here’s a flier for a show that never happened.

Greetings, fuck puppies.  It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything.  But I’ve been feeling that continually posting the same figure drawing bullshit  has made the Google spiders weary of my website.  But now I’ve come up with something a bit different.  Last Sunday I was looking around Goodwill for a good canvas and frame combo to cannibalize, but I wasn’t finding anything.  But what I did find was their stash of 99 cent records.  I was already in the mind to look for a painting that I could sacrifice for my own feeble attempts at art.  When I saw the records, an incandescent flash bulb burst inside my head and I realized, “Hey, there’s some art I can steal.”

I gathered up a collection of the cheesiest Christian folk album covers that I could find to incorporate into my painting.  There were some true gems.  One album was by a band called “Four Jacks and a Jill“, who were apparently a South African folk act from the late 60′s.  Another record I picked up was an album by “The Singing Christians”.  They appear to be a Texan gospel group from the 70′s.  The crown jewel might be the “Sentimental Sing-Along with Mitch” which featured a bright pink album cover and a photo of a man who appears that he might be a direct ancestor of Bat Boy.

When I got home, I had to consider my audience.  What do my fans enjoy?  Who are my fans, besides my Mother?  She gets paintings for free, so I don’t have to consider her market influence.  My fans are most likely slope-headed mouth-breathing failed cloning experiments, just as I am.  Therefore, what would I like to see painting on old 12″ records?  The answer is political and cultural icons in high contrast.  This is what the public needs, and this is what I will deliver.  Here is what I’ve done in the past week.  Expect more, I’m planning to do 12 of them and see if some place in town would like to hang them on a wall.