Tangle - Color Study 01

I decided to dive into a small acrylic color study for "Tangle-The We that Wage," which will be a narrative still life series with a vanitas leaning. The paintings will mix objects I have on hand, and some I'll reference, into a constructed natural-world, where the story will take place. The nude figure is the lower half of the story's protagonist, which I posted an earlier sketch of here.

I used a 12"x9" Saunders' watercolor block and began with a minimal drawing, and then applied very watered down fluid acrylics. Adding too much water to acrylics can hurt its adhesivness if your working on an established paint surface, but at this early stage, the pigments can absorb into the paper, so it's not a problem. The entire painting was done using fluid acrylics, with the addition of Golden's glazing medium and airbrush extender. It's worth making a note that as the paint builds up, the glossiness of the transparent extender starts becoming evident, which made photographing the final image tricky...a thin layer of matt medium will fix the problem though.

I usually start refining certain areas right away, rather than a slow picture-wide build, so I can get a sense of color ... and probably because it makes me feel like I'm progressing faster.

Color study, 12"x9", Saunder's watercolor block.

After two days of painting, I had this final version. When I start the full paintings, I'll probably lower the saturation of objects further from the focal point. I haven't decided what scale I'll use yet. I may keeps the scale like it is in this study, but on a larger surface. Keeping the scale smallish, makes the subject matter seem more jewel like, while a larger scale will have the viewer feel more a part of the scenes' environments...decisions, decisions.

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer – cover s10 issue 14

This originally started with Buffy walking through an attic, with the background/foreground assembling into a likeness of Spike. I was concerned about how well the likeness would read and decided to switch to the easier route and use a landscape...then going a step further I used a literal likeness of Spike carved into stone.

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Final-ish Self-Portrait Painting

self-portrait 2014, acrylic on paper mounted panel. 18"x24"

Detail of painting.

This is the final painting for a life-size self-portrait I started in late 2013. These photographs of the painting are ones I took, but I'll eventually have it professionally photographed. There are a couple of places I'll touch up, but I think it's 99.9% finished...seeing work in a photo always highlights problems, but photos (at least the ones I took) seem to make the painting look a  harsher than it does to the naked eye.

I don't normally paint on paper mounted panels, but it was an experiment. In the future, I'm going back to my standard use of panels without the paper. Acrylics sometimes form unwanted textures, and in this painting I overworked the glazing medium early on, which created pock marked areas. I was concerned about abrading the surface of the paper so I didn't sand the pocked areas until much later on, but it was essential too late to get rid of the texture by that point.

I think I may have spent as much time on the background as I did on the face. I usually paint whatever exist behind the subject, but in this case, the walls of the bathroom were creating some bad compositional lines, so I needed to shift where the walls sat. I added the towel (after several experiments) to fill the large open area and balance the negative space around my head. A fun fact: the towel is a ancient Dungeons & Dragons beach towel from the early 1980's.

The manner in which I painted this was a departure from my normal dry-brushing. Also, I didn't blend as much, leaving some paint stoke visibility, to get away from an overly smoothed effect. Golden's glazing medium is definitely the way to go to allow wet-on-wet blending (it as retarder in it), which is normally difficult with acrylics unless you use fluid acrylics or a lot of water. The glazing medium also facilitated visual blending, by using translucent layers of paint over dry areas and made it much easier to intensify areas of color, without having to repaint.

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Queen Bee Sketch

This was a quick sketch for the heroine of what will eventually be a series of paintings. The paintings will be a series of narrative still lives about bees, life, death, and war. I've been collecting objects over the last year: new, antique, natural, and handmade...to be assembled into compositions for the narrative to play out against. The queen (in the above sketch) is represented as a human, with her head and neck covered in a white-porcelain shell. The tentative title of the series is "Tangle: The We That Wage."

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Butterbroda Pig Roast

This is a new piece from my Butterbroda series.

Titled: "The Feast We Made of Us"
Size: 30"x20"

I introduced a couple of new colors, beyond the additions, which I had used on the Alice in Wonderland piece. I tried a green for the apple and lettuce, but decided to stick with the blue and red, green somehow felt too far outside the color space. While adding more colors frees me up a bit in the way shapes can overlap, it also requires some use of outlines, which I rarely used for colored shapes.

 

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer cover - season 10 issue 13

This cover was the first time I had illustrated Wonderland and Aluwyn and I went with a full-on high fantasy enviornment, surrounding the characters with a glowing fairytale. The environment is a contrast to the tension between the characters, their faces pinched in displeasure: Aluwyn scowls at Willow and Willow turns from Aluwyn with a knitted brown.

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Painting on the floor

This is a 12+ years old self portrait, that needed a some finishing and fixing...at this point the main part that needs to be cleaned up is the shirt. I'm using the foil to protect the painting surface from hand oils.

I've always painted on the floor, mainly because I like to spread out, but also because I want quick access to all my paint tubes, due to the fast drying acrylics on the pallet. I decided to crack open my unused liquid acrylics along with my tubes. I've never used fluid acrylics for painting, but they definitely make life easier in some cases...they do dry-up really fast though, in comparison to the Winsor & Newton tubes, which have some retarder mixed in with them.

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New sequential art

So this happened over the weekend...

This is for a story I wrote in 2006. I wanted to use a new style, and had experimented some but never got past that stage. Recently, I started working on the story again and came to the conclusion that I would be better off partnering with an artist (other than myself). I came to this conclusion mainly because I thought it was better time management...but in the last week the control freak in me began surfacing so I start to experiment again with the newish style. Once I had done a few pieces, I made an impromptu dive into the art for page one. Part of me would prefer the style to be more exaggerated, a little less real, but this direction seems to be working so any alterations will likely be small. I also have a page two which is almost done.

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