I watch movies and whatnot on my computer.  Often times while doing this I open up MS Paint in a window off to the side and proceed to doodle in there with the mouse.  Now, I am not generally inclined to save any of what I do, but I made a couple MS Paint doodles while watching Manhattan the other day that I was sort of fond of.  Here they are:

I was mindlessly doodling in Illustrator and this is what came of it.  It seems reminiscent of the cowboys I was briefly working on a year  or two ago.

Edit to add:  Made a slight change to the look of the blog as well.

I was playing around in Illustrator last night (something I don’t do so much any more) and I created this spaceman head:

Untitled Spaceman  09/2008

It made me think back to the height of my foray into vector art and all the other spacemen I ‘doodled’.  So I thought I would show the ones I could find.  The order on these is vague, as I only sort of know when I made them….

This here is, I think the first.  It only barely qualifies as a space man, more of a space-sloth perhaps, but it is something in space anyway…

Untitled, space-theme, Fall of 2004 I think…

This next one is the first official spaceman I recall created in illustrator.  It is also one of the first things I did in Illustrator where I really felt I had a handle on what I was doing.  It also might be my favorite out of the bunch, mostly because his teeth still make me laugh.

 Untitled Spaceman, February 2005

This next one was a lazy attempt to do something similar to the last one, but for all intents and purposes, nowhere near as exciting (in my opinion).

Untitled Spaceman, probably 2005?

And the last one is something a bit different, more experimental perhaps.  Playing around with some other techniques.

Untitled Spaceman, late 2005 or maybe even 2006, who knows!

So that is all I could find there may be more somewhere else, who knows.

It occurs to me, nearly everything I have posted recently has been a bit on the scary side.  So here is something less scary I have been working on.  It is an adorable dino and his snake friend.

Illustrator with a side of photoshop:

I decided to do another quick painting with the golden open acrylics.  My goal was to do something a big more fast and loose.  Something that took advantage of the wetness of the paint .  So I made this:

It is done on an arches watercolor block, hot press i think… Prepped with one coat black gesso, a layer of neutral gray and van dyke brown and then I slathered a coating of matte medium on top and started to paint while it still felt a touch sticky.

It was a good time. And nice to work in a looser fashion. I tend to get overly tight a lot and it makes for some tedious work.

EDIT: Switched out photo below for a high quality scan of the painting, since it dried.

Another quick test of the Golden Open paints. This one is a bit bigger and I spent a bit more time on it. This surface is pretty rough, I’ll be curious to see how these things work on a smoother surface. On this attempt they seemed not overly dissimilar to the regular paints with retarder… I think I will buy a few more colors so I can try out something more involved.