I did a few paintings this Christmas as presents.  I did one for each of my roommates, and one for my parents.  I naturally waited until the week before leaving for my trip back to Indiana before starting these paintings.  I did three paintings in three days the week before Christmas.  The one for my parents was done on a 16×24 hardboard.  I stole a few idea from looking around the East Side Studio Tour and the 12×12 Box Art Show and started masking a border around my paintings.  It makes them look a lot more complete without a frame.

The paintings that I did for the roommates were both 24×24 with a 4 inch border done on 3/4 inch plywood.  I lifted that directly from something I saw on the studio tour.

I also participated in the Austin Figurative Gallery Winter Opening Show.  I have several paintings hanging up at the USAA.  During the show we did a live painting demo.  It’s always fun to paint in front of a crowd.  Usually it’s done alone.  We did four fifteen minute poses of models in costumes.  We got my favorite models, Drea and Waverly for the special event.  I asked them for space outfits, and they delivered with some great outfits.

It seemed to go well.  Spiderhouse opened the bar in the USAA so we had drinks available.  The music was excellent and we had a good amount of art up in the place, including some incredible photographs by a guy named George.  Unfortunately hte rest of his name eludes me.

I just finished a painting of a street scene of Austin.  This is East 6th Street, somewhere around Rio Rita.

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.