Duckmarine

  Here's another drawing and computer colorization I did. You really can see the Machinarium influence in it. I'm not really keen on the pixelatedness of the pun title. I don't really have much to say about this one. Anyway enjoy!

See you tomorrow!

Bird Elelephantree

   So in the next few days I'll be posting some images that I've made by doing a pencil sketch and coloring them on the computer. It usually leads to really strong colors that are obviously digital. I usually try to scale them down though. But I looooooves me some Chinese red.
This image was a scribble that turned into this image. Most scribbles are easily changed into birds. When making an image I'd draw it up and then scan it in. I'd adjust the levels of the sketch and make it a transparent layer. Then simply paint underneath. It's pretty similar to cell painting I suppose. It makes for quick and easy images.
More to come tomorrow suckers!

Back Garden

  This is a painting I did of the view across from my back garden. It's got that impressive tree there. I really wanted to put lots of texture with thick globs of paint but I couldn't really do it. Also this image isn't really finished. But it's not going to get any more finished because I've decided that it's shitty and I can't be bothered to continue. You can see the tree on the foreground just right of the big tree sort of blends into the background. I tried mixing in specks of color but with spraying flicks of the brush. It's something I started in school with dabbing stipples but just another version. You can see prior experiments here and here. This painting looked pretty cool before I put colors on it though. Alack the day I ruin a grisaille! I know it can be fixed but- srsly tho, whatevz! I got lots of cooler stuff I wanna paint. You'll see! You'll all see and be sorry. You'll herald the day with my name! (Not really)

  On a side note I've sort of expended all of my stores of finished colored paintings from the last couple of years since universty. From here on it will mostly be sketches and drawings but finished works also mixed in. BE WARNED. Also don't stop following! (I know I have zero followers) Please check this every day and comment and be my friend! Please! I beg of you!

Guitar-Thing

  In university I made a couple of Guitars out of old garbage that other students threw away and stuff from the used shops. Here's an image of one. The one in the image above I made a couple years ago as an improvement to the other ones. The center pole which runs to the bottom and makes up the body of the neck and machine head is all solid oak with thin plywood veneer on the top. The scalar length is the same as the 5th fret of a guitar or a baritone ukulele. The five strings are tuned to CGcea, if you noticed it's the same as an ukulele but with a drop G and a low C.

Boat Rocks

  I'm back! It's a whole new day! (wink) This is a painting that I painted with paint on a painting canvas. It's a boat going down some splashy water but uh-oh! Rocks! Dangerous! Be careful guys!
There's that painting by Hokusai with that wave, I put in the top left wave as sort of a joke reference to that image. HA HA I'm so---- funny.

  I tried to make a similar boat out of wood for my nephew, but it wouldn't float right. So I put a big heavy bolt in the bottom of the boat so it would float more upright. But it just ended up being half sunk from the weight and not upright. So I tossed it. I'll try to make a truck or something later.

  This also was sort of based on a sketch that I drew in England some time ago. Just the boat's different and view-angle too.
I did something rare and painted the canvas black and did white on the top. I wanted to use -a lot- of texture but I can never really do it. It came out somewhat interesting though.
Do you like it? I'm not really sure what to think.
I didn't really write this post very good though.

Little House Little Car

Hey guys! I'm really sorry that I missed a day! I was really busy yesterday and I didn't do it. But you know what? Through the magic of the internet I'm going to cheat time and have posted this post that I'm writing today, yesterday! Then I'll write another one later today.

Okay with that disclaimer I can discuss this image. When I painted this I hadn't done watercolor in a while and I had a go. This time I put black lines. There's also oil pastels on there too. I guess the building is a mix of Russian and English traditional styles?

I can't seem to say a whole lot about this image like the others which I've spoke about them way too much. I think it was inspired by the indie game Machinarium which is by the game company Amanita Design. That game is super beautiful.

See you tomorrow! (wink)

Sodam Sign

  So I got a request for a sign for a coffee house in S.Korea. This above is the paper sketch I made after some design brainstorming in another sketchbook. Coffee and Tea for ladies like to have Victorian things going on so I put plants on the side, that's what Victorians always did right? Apart from putting lead powder on their faces and have factory workers burn in fires. The tea cup is based generally on some other cup we have. The ribbon on the bottom is very English too.
I advised against the name but it seems like their hands were tied.

These are some color variations I did in a vector drawing from the sketch on the computer. These aren't the original designs, it's the version I made to show on the internet by adding a bump texture and paper backdrop.

Here's the end product on a window or door or something. I'm very excited on how it turned out.

Night Field

  After painting the image of tiktaalik in university I found that a light source originating near the theoretical eye as if a camera flash was used gives a very visceral quality which I liked a lot.
  I wanted to paint an image of a night time landscape. Something about landscapes at night make me feel really calm. Although I'm not sure how successful this is with conveying that.
  During my time in Shiga Prefecture I'd take walks at different times of day along lake Biwa and I always liked the night scene there. Here's a digital image I painted of it first on nerd-BBS applets.

  Other people tell me the painting above makes them feel unnerved or uncomfortable which wasn't my intention, but I'm not disappointed by that.
  I'm guessing it was the position of the bird that gives this impression. Also the dark and drab colors.
Something to note is the bush just left and above of the bird looks like an egg. Not sure how it turned out like that but I also couldn't be bothered to fix it. Maybe it's a bird-egg simile that happened in my brains. This is one of the first paintings I did using oil pastels on top of oil paint. I wanted to create a certain effect and that was an easy way to do it.

  The hilly scene is an adaptation of an image I found of somewhere in Great Brittan. I forget where but I'm guessing it's in Yorkshire. Just I made it brown. I interspersed different colors and textures that make up the bulk of grassland so it gives the same effect of patchiness that I found in Colorado plains. I don't think I was extreme enough with it though because it still looks too homogenous.
  I didn't really want signs of humanity in the image after sketching the under-drawings a bit with buildings in the distance. I'm not sure why but it felt sort of intrusive. They were going to be around that clump of trees in the distance there.

  Also something interesting about it is when I had it in a show, lots of people called it, "the painting of a red bird." Now, the bird is the very important focal point but still a very very small portion of the whole painting. And it's not entirely red. Actually only it's belly is red and the most of it black and beak yellow. There are these little birds in Colorado who stand in lawns and mowed grass that look similar. The bird was initially going to be completely black but after the initial grisaille I tested a few colors on a photograph on the computer and decided red would look best. After those comments I'm thinking maybe black would have been better. The red dot might be too distracting.

Jesus! How long can I talk about this one dumb painting?? Booring amirite? Please disagree.

Stay tuned for more tomorrow!!!!!!1 Do it!

Gnome Tree Apple

  This is an image I painted when looking after a gallery for my girlfriend. There were three days and it was open eight hours a day and I was there all three. I managed to complete this whole thing in that time.

  I tried the method I produced to do my Baba-Yaga series in university (which can be seen here amongst other illustrations) for the first time with reference to a photograph of a tree. This Bilibin style mixed with more realistic imagery was interesting. I hope to continue honing this technique in future paintings. (Maybe with ducks?)

  I didn't really have a focal point of the painting during the sketch phase so I made up this little big nose creature dude and put a red apple as a secondary focal point. (This focal point garbage is referring to image composition, usually done with placement of a person, face, strong color or strong pattern to create aesthetics.)
  I use that Bruegel red that I like so much. This is how I describe it because artsy-fartsy types might not know what Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is. It's basically a Wes Anderson red. He's very influential to me. You can see his influence on a lot of my university paintings.

  With this painting you can see Japan starting to seep into my color scheme. The saturation came way down except for the focal points. Look at this retailer. Try and find a strong color amongst their products. I dare you.

  The leaf pattern molding on the frame to the image was bought at the hardware store as baseboard molding. Looks really cool.

  This painting is also an example of when I started to depart from rectangular borders. Sometimes it started to look too baroque or romantic when it was all rounded edges so I've started to come back to rectangles again. I'll mention it when those images come up.

  Also one thing which I like to do is make the sky completely pure gray with no other color in it but make everything else yellow-brown. This makes the gray look blue-ish. Color-theory sucks as a class but it's fun to play around with it during your own work. You basically can learn everything you get from a class about color theory from using the sliders in photo editing software (like Photoshop).

  I've said a lot and said not much about the painting in question! That's the way the cookie crumbles though. You think there are too many links in this post? Yeah, maybe. That's also the way the cookie crumbles. They're crumbly cookies.

See you tomorrow! Please come back and see more artwork. Please. Also comment.

Lαмъτοи∙hιƒ∙Ʋỷμм

   I referred to this painting in my last post without showing it so here it is! I decided to paint this image because of my heritage being from the Northeast of England. When I was a child my family introduced me to Worm Hill when visiting more of my family in Penshaw. This story comes from what was once known as county Durham (before redistricting) and involves the dukes of the past.

  The hill has a slight spiral around the top and it's said that was created by the dragon in the story. I made a few decisions when composing this including Lambton's armor being from the first crusade. During that time the language was slowly transitioning from Old English of the Anglo-Saxons to Middle English of the Normans and was slow to reach the north. The lettering on the bottom of the image is mostly Middle English but the grammar and phonetics are Old English. Also you can observe the Duke Lambton's crest of a Ram's head which I placed over the crest of county Durham.

  Saint George's cross was common amongst the crusaders but I had to put it in to allude to Geroge's similar story of killing a dragon. In some versions of the story he creates a suit of armor out of spearheads so he might look like a hedgehog but I decided that would look stupid and would prefer it to be crusader armor. The scene depicts when Lambton confronts the dragon in the River Wear as to keep the bifurcated serpent segments from reattaching.

  The colors are completely Korean. I had just come back from a trip to South Korea and visiting temples there I saw a really neat color scheme which I wanted to use. I didn't want to use standard coloring with a sap-green dragon and traditional colors thought of when imagining old England- I do this because most of our ideas of the medieval times and earlier were romanticized and bastardized by the Victorians. This results in real art and music from that time to seem very foreign or alien.

I've found that the eastern European views of that period of time to feel much more closely extrapolated from that culture.

  There are what are known as "Celtic" weaving patterns around the border because that's what you'd find in the area back then. The term "Celtic" is a little confusing because it doesn't only refer to Gaelic cultures which were in Wales, West England, Ireland, northern France and northern Spain. These patterns should be just as associated with Scandinavian cultures with which the British Ilse have been closely affiliated since forever. I think this is something the Victorians also did.

Anyhow any and all of the 'facts' used in this post may be highly suspect and incorrect so don't use it as a source for your scientific anthropological thesis. I'm just explaining why I painted this image like this okay? Get off my freakin' back alright?

More fun to come tomorrow! Be there or be a variety of standard shapes!

Saint George & the Dragon

  Did another dude fighting dragon painting. The first one was the Lambton Worm which I have yet to post on this blog- and this time I thought why not do St. George and the Dragon. Mainly inspired by Joanna Newsom's song '81 where she mentions it and it sounds all medievaly.

   I knew about the story being basically an outrageous misappropriation by England allegedly since the crusades as their own. Usually images depicted of this story are done as an English knight in shining armor trampling down and jousting a tiny little black wyrm.

   This time I tried to make it as Byzantine of an image I could make it. St. George as a historical person was supposed to have lived in the 3rd and 4th century in Byzantine so I tried to give him period armor. I tried to mimic the gold leaf paintings they had with simple red blue gold coloring (I used gold acrylic gouache).

  Also the story is traditionally a metaphor for Christianity slaying the devil who the pagans believed as a deity and saving a virgin who probably represents the victims of paganism.
   I wanted to simplify metaphor when making the image so I got rid of the woman entirely. Also the dragon is huge and looks dangerous instead of an ugly little varmint because that makes a better story. Why tell a story about someone doing something easy? Drawing it this way also gives a more gradual mix between early christian cultures and classical Greek and Roman culture which in my mind the Byzantine really represents.

So after all of that contextual blathering I have more introspective blathering:

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  This is sort of the approach I have for recent paintings. I don't know if I have the artistry to convey in just one image why I did everything like that. Is that important for the viewer to understand this?
Visually the image is probably mid-range in it's technical or compositional value which most viewers will immediately judge it upon. I should be able to get to a point as an artist where in the way I painted the image the viewer would know how I am trying to break norms and address misconceptions without 4 paragraphs of explanation.
How should I address this problem? What could I have done to convey what I was trying to do without ruining the image?
I feel that any more brute force about it the idea will lose tact.

   Maybe I'm putting too much work on the particulars of each image without addressing worse problems in technique or composition. Or maybe I should try to convey new ideas of my own instead of addressing old ones?
Maybe I should just do what I want for fun. I could expand on sketchbook drawings like before in university. I did a pirate robot genie but is it worth that much effort in painting it meticulously? That idea as a joke is probably good enough as a sketch.

I think I'm lacking being surrounded by creative people with whom I can exchange critique and support. That's my fault. Dunno how to find them though.

I have lots to post on this blog though. It will fill the availability gap of my artwork from my website portfolio of my university work to date.

Stay tuned!

"A Hard Rain"

This is the first image I place on my new Art-blog which I intend to update every day. (This includes garbage that I draw especially.)

The image was supposed to be part of a picture book about Bob Dylan's song "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" but I gave up because it's a really long song. And some lyrics look pretty silly when drawn out.

It's watercolor on paper.

I feel like the image represents an embarkation similar to my endeavor with this blog.