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.

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.

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.

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.

I contributed a couple of paintings to a fundraiser for a local indepentant production of a science fiction rock opera called Faster than the Speed of Light.

It’s from 6-10 Sunday night, May 3rd, at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre.  The play looks pretty cool and the fundraiser event sounds like a lot of fun.  There’s gonna be bands and probably a lot of short haired girls wearing glasses.  Which is enough to get me to kick in a couple of paintings. More info here.

Here’s the paintings that I contributed:

So come on out and pay a lot of money for my paintings, or somebody else’s.  It advances the cause of short haired girls doing cool shit.

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.