More work done on those two paintings I showed.  Here the are separate!

I just need to paint those wormy things and pull out some highlights on this one.

This one still needs lots of work, but its coming along.  It’s way to pink, I need to de-pinkify it a lot.

More on these as they happen.

I have two paintings going right now, I got some work done on them this weekend.  Here is a photo of them.

Not to much to say about them yet, but I am please with how they are coming along so far.  More later.

I have spent the long weekend painting like a fiend.  I am working on a  series of Twin Peaks portraits.  Here are the first seven, as they exist at the end of this weekend:

All done of wood panels, roughly 5″x8″.

I think these are mostly done, but noting is for sure just yet.  I’ll be doing at least one more, maybe 3 more, depending on time and motivation.

This group is quite a bit different than my normal stuff I think…

Better quality versions will be posted when I decide they are done.

I have spent the past several weeks working on a painting for a group show coming up in a few months at Gallery 1988.  The show is Under the Influence: A tribute to the Beastie Boys.  I’ll post more info about the show as it gets closer.  In the mean time I will share with you the piece I have produced:

Ensconced Triad; Acrylic on Canvas, 11″20″

And here is a some of the process:

1) The final composition, with all the bits combined in photoshop and ready to transfer

2) The drawing transferred  onto the canvas

3) The underpainting

4) All the color is blocked in

5) Color is refined a bit and the microphones are added back in

6) The painting was nearly done at this point, all that was left was final highlights and detailing

That’s all for now.

I have spent the past couple weeks working diligently on a painting for a show in a few months.  I am taking my time with it, trying to work through all the bits that bother more methodically.  I’m not going to show too much until I am done with it, because, well, I don’t want to.  BUT here is a shot of my current painting setup with it sitting on the easel.  You can sort of the see the painting…

More of this painting when it is done.  And maybe some smaller stuff in the interim, who knows.

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.

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.

I made this doodle recently.

I decided to make it into a digital piece.  So I made this thing.

The doodle was kind of cute.  This, I think, is just sort of strange…