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.

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

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.