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Working on many things

Boy did this year go whizzing by.  I’m hoping to finish up the year with one last acrylic painting. It isn’t looking like I’ll hit the 12 Paintings in a year that I hoped for.  On the other hand I did blow that goal out of the water if you measure it by surface area.  I was originally planning on 18×24 being the default size until I fell for the box 30x40s.

I’m still hoping to do all of next year in oils, but I may delay the start of that until the Jeff Miracola oil videos are launched, that would let me experiment a bit with acrylics before then.

Still having a hard time letting go of the feeling that everything has to be the most complete piece that pushes skills to the limit.  I may do a bit of a mini quickndirty Painting challenge.

But for now the end of the year looks to be coming fast and that has all sorts of repercussions to ‘free’ time.

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Long Live the Littles

Jude Little

 

Jude LittleFinished another painting,  tremendously happy with parts of it,  but I think I need to take a break from these larger pieces for a while.  It’s been very exciting to work big and loose but the surface area size and the quick drying time of acrylics are working against me at this point.  But on the upside, it really feels like that’s something that’s been hard to get to the point of noticing,until recently. That has to mean that I’m getting to the point of making the mental shift from working to just get paint onto canvas in the right spots to the point of having a feel for the paint itself and having the working time to execute the mental image.

And that, is an improvement artistically.

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Added a couple older paintings

Added 2 not so new (Nov & Dec 2015) paintings to the gallery.

I’m sure they’ll be replaced fairly soon as I hope to be cranking out newer and better pieces over the year.

The 2nd painting of the year (now almost a month behind schedule) is getting it’s final lines and color comp this week and Hopefully will be done shortly thereafter so I can catch up by the end of March.

web-dragonSlayer Offering to the Frog God

 

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New WIP

The doldrums of summer and start of a new school year is like a parasitic leech that sits on your forehead and drains motivation and inspiration right out of you.

 

But what do you do?  You plow through it.

goldenturtle

thumbnail / color rough for a new painting.

Pretty excited to see where / how this one goes.

 

 

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Long time no bloggy.

Ok, been a bit hectic and I’ve been a bad blogger. 🙁

I feel I can blame it on the impending arrival of offspring and get on with it.

the debbil
the Devil

Couple paintings are done and there’s now a nice angel and demon in 24×24″ panels in the front hall. You know.. to scare people away from the good art that covers the rest of the house.

So the current plans (subject to revision but hey I feel better when I can pretend life’s going according to some sort of plan) is to prep the baby room and get the 2 paintings finished in time for baby Jude to arrive.    Then it’s baby time and squeezing in the last touches on Mutant Sheep Eat The Planet! and get that finished out by Summer in addition to getting some more freelance work and getting Wenderflonia all set up and ready to take over the art world.

The entry to the kitchen
The entry to the kitchen
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Slow progress, but good things none the less

Wow time sure does fly, and whoa am I so totally not going to make the Oct 31 deadline! Which more or less means that November and December are going to be choked with Holidays and Family.

And it turns out there’s a little baby boy inbound, eta Feb 25(ish) (holy crap!)

So that has got to be more or less the last deadline, beacause somehow I don’t think there’s gonna be much free time after that for a while.

So, you might ask, what the hell have you been doing for the last 18 days.   Well, Mutant Sheep progress has been slow… much slower than I wanted but I seriously needed a break. More After the Break, Pictures too! Continue reading Slow progress, but good things none the less

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Clockworld, It’s Done!

So it only took a little under 7 months, this weekend I finally wrapped up the behemoth that’s been hanging in the kitchen since January. The biggest change was wiping out the sun, which I spent so much time into getting perfect the first time around. However it just wasn’t working. Once the sun got off the canvas the remainder just fell into place.

While it was fun for the most part, I’m seriously gonna think twice before starting another canvas of that size. It just takes so long and so much effort you wind up just tired of it before you’re halfway, and then once part comes out brilliant, just as imagined, everything else seems sub-par. Thank god it wasn’t in oils though, or I’d just be starting the glazes.

Next up, a commissioned (I barter for exotic liquor) series of cute jungle animals for a cute little niece. Lions, gazelles, giraffes and a penguin(?) oh My!

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Wandering

Ok so it’s been a bit hectic with a bunch of things that just had to get done, which turns out to have sapped my usual laser like (HAH!) focus.

But the creative itch is growing and I have a feeling I’ll be cracking open the acrylics soon.  (that and I owe lil sis some cute animal pix for superbaby’s room).

With the help of GuitarTricks.com I’ve been attempting to get a grasp on the whole playing guitar thing, and I’m getting better.  The best thing I did was to buy a decent guitar (Rouge acoustic/electric Dreadnought from musiciansfriend.com), not having to slice your fingers trying to jam down the strings makes a huuge difference, and it sounds better too) .

Other than that, a super co-operative project with GFW is underway and we’re having fun and getting some serious progress made.

Programming at work, however, is pretty much making sure it’s the last thing I want to go home and do as well.. so BSDDoD! may have to stay on the backburner for a while.

But first, vacation in 18 days.

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Painting – Day 5 Darkness falls.

It did waaay not flow easily today.  Not happy with it but its still an improvement so I guess that’s a plus.  

I’m going to need to buy some more blue paint before I start to play with the sunlit sky..   Gah  and I’ve used almost half a tube of white so far..  oh well.

Kinda weird tho.. I didn’t work on the parts I wanted to work on.. 

painting-day-4-darkness
Day 5 - The Darkening

{edit:  oops this was day 5}

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Painting- day 4

got a good 2 1/2 hours of slapping pigment around.. was nice but eventually aching feet and the palette told me it was time to call it a day.

 

when theres no more room on the palette its time to stop.
when theres no more room on the palette its time to stop.

I got 2 sides of the planet rendered… Not really happy about the empty hillside one… but not really sure what to add to it.  maybe something will come to me overnight.

painting-day-3-002

Kinda went totally ocd on the plantlife  (thanks wen) 

here’s a detail 

painting-day-3-005

Anyway.. it’s a good day’s progress i think.. tomorrow I’m seriously going to have to tackle the gears in the planet and figure out how to get things to work together.. oh well.

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Painting – day 3

Got a good couple hours in last night.  I was originally just going to put in the base colors for the earth and grass and block out the buildings… buuut.. I simply had to paint something instead of just filling in boring flat blocks of color.

I wound up having a great time, put on the headphones and tuned out the universe for 2 hours… bliss!

Anyway  here’s a crappy cellphone picture (color corrected in photoshop) (and the trees were still wet so that’s why theyre shiny.)

painting-day3
Day three- earth and grass
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Art weekend… succcess

Spent the weekend playing around with acrylics with Wendy.

Took the plunge and started on a big canvas..  It’s definitely a big project, maybe a little too big.. but it’s actually been a lot of fun so far..

first steps
first steps

here’s the (1) initial sketch done as a doodle during a meeting at work. (2) A brief color rough / enlargement done in about 20 minutes on the pc.  and (3) finally the first couple of scribbles to get it onto the freshly gessoed canvas.

art-weekend-002
Drawing on canvas.

Here’s a picture of the canvas with more of the sketch transferred.

Further blues

Laying down the base blue

Laying down the base blue
Further blues
Further Blues
And wrapping it up for the weekend
The Sun and Moon and the Stars
The Sun and Moon and the Stars

Not a bad start  Got most of the base colors for everything laid in..

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Productivity Paint & Pretty Lines

Soo it’s been a fairly productive beginning of November.  I’ve got the version 1.0 of the new http://www.beautifulbasics.com up and running.  Still need to put up some instructions etc etc.  But the core functionality is there and it works fine.

Yaay and It’s actually quite addictive, and embeddable into myspace/facebook etc etc.  I’ve got a whole list of secondary features to add to it and minor bugs to iron out.  

I’ve been playing with the acrylics again and starting to get a feel for it.  Maybe things actually get easier with practice…. nahh.  Anyway it was quite fun  to just glop paint around and see what emerged.  Can’t wait to do it again.

 

just messing around
just messing around

Oh well back to the salt mines.