Check it out, his hand and arm aren’t done! CrAZy!!
This young man is about to go pick some flowers. Or was, several years ago, before I mysteriously stopped drawing him and NEVER STARTED AGAIN. I actually don’t know why…??
Other old/unfinished art from The Balance: Resurrection Field||Resurrection Men||White Robe||Balance sketch001||More old artwork
Just sketches that came out of a job I’m currently doing. It’s always fun to experiment with some unremarkable photo you have and mess with all the settings until you end up with something terrifying like this! I might develop them either for Night Gallery 2014 or for my upcoming Darkness reload, we’ll see.
I promised back in my Plague Doctor post that I would post my 30 day NaNoManGo project, The Ocean concept sketches, soon. Today seems just as good a day as any! These are daily concept sketches for my developing comic “The Ocean,” done in November 2013. As you may be able to tell, the comic will deal with the Black Plague during medieval times.
And for the rest, you’ll just have to wait and see…
This is most of the linework from Elegy, the only progress shot I think I have of it. I just love the complexity of all the lines in an organic shape like a tree, and these lines here don’t even begin to touch on the millions of actual lines that are really there: in the bark, the outlines and veins on every leaf, and so on. A tree really is a stunning visual overload!
So occasionally I just like to stare at this piece every now and then and lose myself in lines. They’re so much easier to see and appreciate without any shading or color to distract from them.
I hope to post a nice little feature on the Big Lebowski in Little China show soon, but in the meantime I can definitely show you the evolution of Miao Yin from a digital painting to a beaded mixed-media piece with gold ink accents! (I ended up calling the final piece “Miao Miao” through some perverse desire to be a truly horrible person.)
This piece is at PG Gallery until May 17 2014 and is only $85. And trust me, I’m not making another beaded one. One was quite enough!! *PHEW!*
EDIT: This lovely piece has found a home with its biggest fan! I even got to talk to the person who got it, she’s super-sweet. There’s just nothing like seeing one of your pieces go home with someone you know loves it.
I always save my little son’s phone doodles simply because they’re so bright and cheerful. My goal was eventually to make a big gallery of them so I could view at them all at once and enjoy the feast of random colors and shapes that emerged. (Kind of like Jodie Foster listening to washing machines in Contact.) After seeing the finished gallery, I actually think it would be fun to try a “redraw” of some of these sketches where I took an interesting form or idea from one of Paul’s pieces and then actually tried exploring it in one of my own drawings. I might try it!
With due credit to the original artist of course.
I’ll be making more “phonetasia” posts exploring the weird things you can do with various phone apps and filters. Paul’s art below was made using Kids Doodle.
As promised! Wow, where to begin.
First off I will start off by saying this is referring to creating a .mobi file with the Kindle Comic Creator to be used as a kindle book for sale on Amazon. I made digital files for Comixology and IndyPlanet as well, but all that involved was sending them a .zip file of nice huge .tiff images and they do they rest!
…not so with Kindle. Continue reading
Yep, I made an Angel Rex tray. He didn’t stick around long, I can assure you, he was snapped up pretty quick…but in the time I shared with him, I loved him.
You might notice some black streaks or faint smudginess in the red of the tray. That’s because I used a block print of Rex as an experiment. Not surprisingly, the ink smudged! I would caution anyone against decoupaging a block print for this reason. If, like my little rex tray here, the piece still looks pretty nice with streaking, go for it. But I would not recommend the approach if you desperately want a crisp, clean-looking piece. Gritty pieces only!
Let’s switch gears and take a look at some progress shots from a horror/psychedelic piece I did a couple of years back, about one of my favorite movie characters, The Abominable Dr. Phibes. I did this as a vector piece for the most part, figuring that using zillions of shape layers would add a subtle angularity and therefore a dimension of unreality to the piece. I also wanted to use super crazy saturated colors, so having a ton of solid and transparent little shapes that couldn’t really blend and get muddy like paints to also helped. I was pretty darned happy with how it came out, honestly! Looking at the progress shots really kind of cracks me up though, especially the initial sketch. He almost reminds me of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas…
Also, if you notice the first sketch says “Impressions of Africa.” For some reason I was thinking of the Dali painting of that name when I conceived this piece. I forget why…maybe because Vincent Price as Dr. Phibes reminds me a little bit of Dali at his most dramatic. Dali certainly paints himself in a theatrical way in “Impressions of Africa.” I tried to mirror Dali’s pose a bit in the sweeping gesture of Dr. Phibes, but by the end of it I’d forgotten about Dali and had no thoughts other than making it as lurid as possible. Hopefully I succeeded!
I took the name for this traditional linoleum block print from the ancient Greek legend of the singer Orpheus and his wife. Orpheus and Eurydice were deeply in love and happy, but on the night of their wedding Eurydice ventured out into a field (some say to dance) and was bitten by a snake and died. Orpheus then descended into the Underworld and got Hades to agree to allow him to take Eurydice back to the realm of the Living, provided he did not look back at her on the way. Tragically, Orpheus looked back almost as he and Eurydice were about to be reunited, and she remained in the land of the dead.
The high heel shoe implies dancing to me and a beautiful woman, and the bear trap in the field shows the misfortune and the sudden snap of deadly jaws that sealed Eurydice’s fate. Below are the different sketches I made before making my print and adding watercolor to it. Eurydice was originally made for Hand Prints 2012 and went on to appear in mixed-media collage form in last year’s Earth Day Art Crawl (above).
In my last post I mentioned that DRIFT had gone through different forms. Here you see DRIFT:SCRAP, a piece I made for last year’s Earth Day Art Crawl. I took a copy of my digital painting and decoupaged it to a piece of scrap wood left behind by the last people who owned our home, then screwed in different bits of machinery from busted appliances. I wanted to both extend the lines of the reclaimed bits in the children’s home-made rocket and also explore the Earth Day theme of art made from found objects. Everyone loved it including me!
My pictures of the piece are from last year (read: last phone) and aren’t that hot, but I’ll try to get some new ones. I still have this baby and I’ll be bringing it to this year’s Earth Day Art Crawl on the 19th where it will be for sale!
Back in the days before I had an easier-to-use phone camera, the occasional odd work of traditional art would slip by me without getting fully documented. Such is the case with Phosphate, a piece I was actually quite proud of. I made it as a challenge to myself for last year’s Earth Day Art Crawl.
That year, the inaugural year of the art crawl, we participating artists were challenged to make art which was either environmentally themed, made from recycled materials, or both. I responded by making a phosphate-polluted pond with lovely koi-like fish below the scummy surface, digging out some neglected mod podge and a frame from an old piece of art. Little did I know that mod podge would soon become a frequent element in my traditional art pieces! At the time I just wanted a good way to seal up the old frame and effectively represent the uneven surface of a pond. Here are the progress shots I did manage to get of the piece:
You can see something of the finished piece in the last image, but alas! It is partially covered up by the next pieces I was working on, my “Fleurs du Mal” collage series. I was in something of a rush and I barely finished Phosphate before it was time to run it over to the gallery. Comforting myself that I would be able to document it once the show came down, my hopes were dashed when I discovered it had sold. (Certainly a piece of art being sold is something of a nice consolation prize though.)
I hope you’re happy with your new owner, Phosphate!
This piece is one of many versions of this linoleum block print I did for the 2012 Hand Prints show:
A friend of mine had a lot of fun taking it and coloring on it to create three collaborative pieces as well:
And lastly, I recently used them in different pieces for my December 2013 solo show:
The Sleep of Reason on Society6||Redbubble
In other words, those mudpuppies really got around! I’m not sure when I first hit upon the idea of using my own art as collage to make new pieces, but I’m currently using the same approach on my Kaguya Hime piece in progress. Part of a totally unrelated piece (Moonlit Night, in fact!) is supplying the huge swollen moon behind the princess.
I personally like finding new ways to use different elements I’ve made that lend themselves to replication (mainly my digital and block prints) because that way, as an artist I still have the option of finding a better way to finish a work of art. If something I made doesn’t stand out in its original setting but later becomes much more successful in a completely different context, I feel very gratified. I have also done this with very old art, using amateur monoprints as effective and vibrant backgrounds for newer, more skilled block prints or incorporating crude paintings from my youth into new collage art.
How do you feel about re-using a piece of art or making series based on many variations of an element you’ve created?
A couple of months back, I got back into linoleum block printing again after an absence of more than a decade to participate in Hand Prints. I started with five different designs: Eurydice, Daedalus, Tentacle Raccoon, Bait, and Angel Rex. They were easy enough to create digitally (my current primary method of making art), but things changed once I faced the task of carving them, inking them, and getting them onto paper. It was quite the logistic challenge to figure out where in heck to do the printing and what I needed to do to make each piece come out all right. I took some photos of my workspace during the process.
Sandpaperdaisy Art 