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.

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.

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 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.