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.

So, last night I painted a quick test with the new Golden Open Acrylic paints on the market.  I liked how they worked.  However, I decided to continue the test and add some regular heavy body acrylics applied on top.  I started off with just some color washes then cleaned up the highlights a bit.  But basically, I just glazed in some color.  Which, incidentally was something else I had been meaning to try, which is to do a black and white tonal painting for value, then add color via glazes on top of that, just to see how it works.  So, I was able to kill two birds with one stone on this.  As it stands the normal acrylics I used worked just fine, as advertised, so still pleased with them

Here is the color version:

and for reference, the black and white version again:

Oh and this thing is maybe 4″x5″ on black gessoed watercolor paper…

I suppose the next test will be to mix the new paints with the regular ones and some of the mediums I use and see how that all works out.

This post is just a few small things from the past few days, all done in black and white and grays.  The first two are some doodles I did while sitting in an airplane waiting to take off the other day.  I had 3 brush pens and a moleskine with me.  These were the results:

And secondly,  I decided to give the new Golden Open acrylic paints a try.  Their thing is that they dry extra slow so you can work them a bit longer, more like oils perhaps.  This was quick, maybe 30 minutes with just bone black and titanium white.  I am not displeased with the result and found the paint itself to be quite nice to work with.  I might have to get more colors and add it into my regular rotation of paints.  More experiments and tests to come…