There's a first time for everything...

I was digging through some of my old stuff the other day and I came across yet another assignment I wanted to rehash. Once upon a time a teacher gave the assignment to illustrate the poem "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelly with current events in mind. Well, at the time, Katrina was very current, so that's the tilt most of the assignments took. In earnest, my piece made no sense. Well, it made sense to ME at the time, but now... even I can't remember what it's supposed to be about. That's a bad thing. I aimed to refocus my attention to see if I came up with something that was more readily accessible to the public at large.

This painting is a first for me as I somehow managed to make it through four years of art school (through the bulk of the Bush administration) without painting Dubya once. At the time I very much tried to avoid political commentary, and I just think I got lucky that none of my teachers assigned something that was strictly "politician-geared". The research for this guy was a lot of fun. That's a Brown Pelican sitting on his head - the state bird of Louisiana. The view of the city is looking east, so aside from the river (which is on the other side of the buildings) the nearest body of water is Lake Pontchatrain - 4 miles to the north. And the last thing that I'll mention is the shadows on the buildings are accurate for about 10:00 am on a Louisiana morning.

Attatched below is a version of the painting sans the type, and for grins and chuckles the original painting I turned in.

Oil on canvas. 21 1/2" x 17 1/2"

Sexting

This is something I've known has been going on but hadn't known it was given a name until very recently. In a nut shell sexting is the act of sending nude (or semi-nude) pictures via text message, and - big shocker - it's particularly popular amongst high school students. The big-ticket item surrounding this issue is - how close to child pornography is it?

There are kids in schools all across the country who are formally being charged with child pornography. Generally speaking the photos are intended solely for the boyfriend or girlfriend, but the problem arises when the photos are shared between classmates and children from other schools. In some cases there have been reports of the pictures winding up on the internet. Once it hits the internet and Myspace or Facebook (or really whatever your social networking site of choice may be) it spreads like wildfire - and that's the kind of thing you just can't get back.

Then again, kids are notorious for not thinking that far ahead. It all seems well and good when they're together and feel like it'll be that way forever, but if there's a messy break-up there's no telling what someone may do out of anger. (And honestly I'm willing to bet a good percentage of the time a messy break-up isn't required for someone to share and brag with their buddies.) Anywho... I'm not here to try to argue one point over the other, and there are plenty of more eloquently written articles on the matter out there, so yeah...

I wanted my image to be kind of flirty without being to sexy or over the top, and I felt I had to get the idea across that it was a text (picture) message but that the whole thing is kind of ridiculous. Hence the emoticon winking face ;) My friend likes it, but says it's kind of creepy, (I suppose it's too soon after she saw Coraline) but I think that speaks to the issue at large. That kids as young as 8th graders (14 years old on average) and willingly exposing themselves in such a way. Oh well, I guess I'm just an old fuddy-duddy at heart.

Oil on canvas. 10 x 14

Swimmin' with the Sharks

About two months ago I posted a Laker's Girl pin-up I had done as a gift for a friend. As stated towards the end of that post, a coworker said he wanted one for his favorite team - which happens to be the San Jose Sharks. So I set about to do my thing.

The drawing stage gave me the most grief of the entire process. Though once I was happy with it and had it transferred to the canvas, the whole thing went by extremely quickly. All in all I spent four hours at the easel painting. This was the first time I had a 1:1 scale final drawing taped to my easel as I painted, and that helped inform a lot of my decisions more than my reference did. Pretty soon I was checking the reference mostly for color matching and letting the drawing I've already done guide my hand.

When all was said and done I was able to present the painting to my coworker and it was warmly received. So much so that another coworker remarked that he wants one for his favorite hockey team. I think he may have to wait a while, however. I compiled a list of the projects I want to undertake and it was a lot longer than I thought it was going to be. There's nothing like seeing something in black and white to get the blood moving and the creative energy flowing.

Oil on canvas. 12" x 16"

Snap. Crackle. Paint.

A while back I drew this image and I've even tried to paint it a couple of times, but it never quite came out the way I was hoping it would. Though recently as I've been fine-tuning an approach, I thought I'd give it another shot. The greatest challenge of this piece was working on the crackle-pasted substrate. It behaves nothing like canvas and in fact is a little more absorbent than my beloved canvas.

All of that aside, I think it did well. The goal was to learn how to paint on crackle paste, and I'm well on my way to figuring that out. Initially I painted too thin, and while I didn't run into many adhesion problems, I did run into blending issues. Then I thickened up the mix a bit and instead started covering over the crackle. All in all I like to consider it a victory.

Oil on board. 10 x 12

Hanh

I was down to my last 4x6 panel a few months ago and I wanted to make it special somehow. I have the tendency to get overly precious about the last of anything I have, even if getting more is a simple matter of picking them up the next time I'm at work. The point is, I wanted it to be good and from the heart. I can be such a sap like that sometimes.

Naturally I spent a great deal of time agonizing over who I was going to paint for the last portrait in this round of 4x6 paintings. Then some friends of mine lost someone to a drunk driver in an accident. They were all devastated, and while I didn't truly know the fellow, it reopened a lot of wounds from when I lost my friend Hanh. I spent the next little bit of time looking for a picture I could have sworn I had. All I could come up with was her volleyball picture and though the face in that picture is less than half an inch high, I couldn't abandon my pursuit.

I've always wanted to do a portrait of Hanh, but never felt capable of the challenge. And though I fought this painting every step of the way and it didn't turn out anywhere near where I hoped it would, I still love it. In many respects it was just like my relationship with Hanh, and it brings a smile to my face.

So this is for you, Hanh. You're never too far from my thoughts and somehow still manage to be a source of constant inspiration. I miss you.

Where it all began... kind of.

I upgraded my light kit today. After spending some time trying to engineer a way to hold my polarizing filters in place I was all set up and ready to shoot artwork. And shoot I did.

In my digging around for things I wanted to shoot or re-shoot I pulled this bad boy off the wall. This is the very first oil painting I've ever done (circa 2000). I had NO idea what I was doing and if I remember correctly I only had two cheap brushes and a plastic palette knife. I had put a sheet of cardboard or something down so I wouldn't get paint on my bed, but it didn't really matter because I was using the paint straight from the tube in all it's thick and creamy glory. The thought of diluting it with medium was a thought that wouldn't occur to me for another six years or so. But then again, I had NO idea what I was doing. You should have seen me gingerly carry this around for the six months it took just to dry to the touch. The rest of my ineptitude aside, I'm still really pleased with how the lightning bolt on the right came out.

The assignment was a response to music and I decided to paint waves that look suspiciously like mountains, now that I think about it. Either way, I keep it hanging in my studio so that I'll have a sense of where it is that I came from, for whatever that might be worth.

Oil on canvas. 11" x 8"

Before too long I'll be posting other things that I shot in my delirium this evening.

I'm all pixelated.

In about an hour I'll be taking my friend to the airport, so I whittled away my time (not sleeping) watching the Terminator trilogy and scribbling in Photoshop. I'm becoming more and more comfortable making images in Photoshop, and one of these days I'm going to actually finish a piece with it.

I'm still having a fair amount of trouble when it comes to choosing colors. On this one I cheated a little by creating a bunch of swatches from the original reference. (But, I suppose it isn't really cheating since "no one cares how you got there".) With about a half-dozen colors plucked from the reference I laid in blocks of color and then tweaked the opacity to come up with "new" colors to fill out my range. It's the closest I can come to mixing so far.

Sigh. It's getting there, but I miss painting. Painting started making sense - or at least it became less mysterious. My friend pointed something out to me the other day that hadn't fully occurred to me about working digitally. The arm is missing. Since I usually draw/paint at about 16x20 or larger, I tend to work more with my arm than my wrist. I find it's more comfortable and that's why I don't keep a sketchbook as much these days. But, I can't work that way with digital. There's no holding the tool to work with it's side, and that's taking some getting reacquainted with.

Photoshop has sort of become my working sketchbook in an attempt to get used to it again. Since I started painting I started thinking more in terms of blocks of value and color. Pencils became inadequate for getting at what I was thinking, but now I can knock out full value roughs with the same kind of marks I'd make on canvas. (Kind of like working with a sketch canvas like Leyendecker used to, so he'd know where all of his brushstrokes were on the final painting.) So that's neat. I'm thinking more and more I'll just use it for preparatory work for illustration, but who knows...

J.C. Leyendecker

Today is Joseph Christian (J.C.) Leyendecker's birthday. Or, well, it would be if he were still alive. He was born this day in 1874 and is American's unsung illustrator. Though, I'm happy to say, in recent years he's been experiencing a much needed resurgence.

He was one of the greatest influences on Norman Rockwell, though he is rarely credited as such due to a falling out, of sorts. in fact, Norman used to hang around the train station when he was a lad to catch a glimpse of Joe coming home from the big city.

J.C. lived a very secretive life, so there isn't much in the way of readily available information, but there are two books on him now, one by Michael Shau (1970) and the new one by Cutler and Cutler (2008). It was the secretive lifestyle that served as the wedge driving him and Rockwell apart. Joe's "handler", Charles Beech (model, manager, and lover) always managed to keep the two apart, or to limit their interactions. I suppose Beech didn't appreciate the adoration Rockwell showed Leyendecker. Rockwell took it personally and went on record to say that Leyendecker "couldn't paint a woman with any sense of compassion." It was an attack that suggested Leyendecker was homosexual, without affirmitavely outting him. Despite how he may have been hurt by Joe however, Rockwell purposely stopped one short of Leyendecker's impressive 321 Saturday Evening Post covers in silent reverence.

I've had the great fortune to see many of his originals in person, and he continues to be one of greatest inspirations. I'm slowly collecting his post covers when I can find them, and one of my loftiest ambitions is to own an original painting before I die. I was planning on writing something up on his art, but I think I'll let it speak for itself:

I forgot to sleep.

I often joke about forgetting to eat, but it's actually the sad truth. When I sit down and start to throw myself at something everything else around me just gets blocked out. It isn't a good thing when you stop to think about it. In fact it's dangerously close to self-destruction on more than one level, but it is what it is. Like tonight. I was looking for something to serve as a distraction temporarily before going to bed and I had finished the book I was reading, so I thought I'd play with my new tablet some more. I couldn't think of anything immediately so I went to my tried and true stand by - I redid something I've already done. (Well technically I'm in the process of redoing it, but you know what I mean.)

Some people do master studies, others do... ok, so I don't know what others do. But I typically will take another stab at something I've done that I thought had some merit to see if I've actually been learning. The original of this piece was a cover for an environmental magazine two years ago, and amusingly - at least to me anyway - enough it was the last digital piece I did for an assignment. I've wanted to recreate it as a painting as I gained confidence in that arena and that's still the plan. When the redraw is done I think I may just render it as a grisaille, print it, enlarge it, and then transfer it to canvas and paint it. (I can't shake this desire to have a tangible original in my grubby little hands.)

Whatever I do, I want to do it fairly quick. I've got another project quite literally on the board that I've put on the back burner to play on the computer.

Photoshop CS3 and Intuos 3 tablet.

Dreaming in Digital

I have digital fleas. I can't see them, but they keep biting me and I just have to sit with my tablet and draw draw draw. After the other night all I want to do is sit in front of my computer and push pixels around.

So I present a quick portrait study of my friend Graciela.

576 x 864 pixels. Photoshop CS3. 9 x 12 Intuos 2 tablet.