string doll still life, moving along nicely, it'll be done by monday :]

Finally Finished. Wall Still life. Time to start my next painting

It has more than 10 hours of work put into it, and i'd have to say I am pretty pleased with its final out come. I have critique on Wednesday. This still life doesn't have to be done for my personal crit, but I wanted it to be finished so I can work on my next painting.

Detail

For my final painting, I put down a ground of red acrylic paint and drew the string dolls in with a blend of darker reds. By adding a ground of colour, it enriches the colours that you lay on top of it. So, since the first doll on the far left is red, the reds that i'm using with appear to be more vibrant in colour.

Similar to my wall still life, the ground is more of an orange on this painting than a true red. My wall still life used a yellow ground to make the red pop more. When painting reds, its better to use a cadmium yellow than adding white to make it lighter. You want your painting to look red, not pink. By adding yellow it creates an orange that also appears in the fabric that was on the wall when light was shining onto it.

In this photo I finished adding the white/grey background.

This is kind of a bad photo, but oh well. As you can see, the red is more intense on the string doll, and all that is thanks to the red ground underneath.

almost done

Wall Still Life.. Still progressing. Should have it finished by tomorrow

There is still a lot to be done with this painting. However tomorrow I have to start another painting and have that finished before my painting class is over, and I haven't decided to do either a still like again, or a self portrait. I'll just have to see I guess.

something fell on my painting ... I might have to start over.

newest painting assignment.... wall still life

Before anyone ask's why its yellow. The base of the red sheet thats pinned on the wall has a yellow undertone, and if the acrylic base of the painting wasn't yellow the red would turn out more pink than what it should be. The high lights of the sheet should appear to be orange in colour not pink. so.. yeah..

the still life that I made is just some random things that I have collected. Since in this painting we have to have 7 items I chose two glow in the dark bats, some string voodoo balls and a noose that I made out of string when I was bored in class.

Recreation Painting done!@$!

There are still some little adjustments to be made on this painting, but all in all it is done.

I actually really enjoyed working on this painting a lot, and i'm glad that it actually turned out really nice. I can't wait to put this up on my wall in my apartment :]

Recreation Painting: Van Gogh

So far this is the only project that I actually like, and willing to put up on my wall.

High intensity on pre painted masonite

so far in school we are doing a lot of still lifes and self portraits. the still lifes are pretty cool, but if I have to paint myself one more time im gunna freak the fuck out haha

First Week of UNI!#%!

so the first week went by like a flash.. but of course it would since i only have 3 classes hahaha this would be the first time that I actually have days of the week off which is amazing. so knowing me i would probably work on homework and such on these days.

so far monday is my worse day for class since it starts at 9 and i wont get home till 8 at night or so.. well i'll have to see how that goes.

Got bored and painted my shoes

I started this painting almost 9 months ago, and it is still not finished in my eyes. Every time I look at it, it needs something. and I'm just not sure what that is yet.

With this painting, I wanted to get back into pointillism, mostly because I find it rather relaxing, but also because of the effect that it gives to the piece. You can probably see that even though I've been working on this painting for the past 9 months I only still have the first layer of dots on. I eventually want this painting to be completely covered in dots, ranging in colour. The reason being is I find that it creates an interesting illusion of depth to the painting. and it makes it so I and others can sit and stare at it for hours.

Now since i'm moving and this painting is in oil, I've had to let it dry so it can be transported in the back of my trailer when I move. when I get settled into my place in Halifax I'll resume painting on it. In the mean time I've started smaller paintings that are about 1' by 1' and I started them the same way as this painting. I've decided to make my own black with different undertones for these smaller paintings and see if it makes a difference with the final piece, i'm sure that it will, since a straight tone black creates an entire different feel to my bigger paintings.

My documentation will also improve, since I just recently got a new digital camera, its not a fancy pants camera but a normal nikon camera, and I can say that the image quality is a thousand times better than the camera I use to use.

In my second half of my Third year at Fanshawe I was painting Jelly fish, All the time. I've always found jelly fish to have this weird angelic quality to them, an almost alien creature in my neck of the woods.

I've been working on this painting for the past 9 months, and finally painted a jelly on it. and continuing with this composition, constantly layering, and adding colour as I go

New work.

its in the works, i've just been really lazy lately. and it doesnt help when the weather isnt great. Even though school doesnt start for another 4 months, i'm starting to get a little stressed over it. I think its just because I have to move to another province.. but I don't know I just don't feel like it.

This is in know way complete. It takes a few hours to start the background, and the background is the most touchy part in this process ( i work in layers) so I try and make it as cloud like as possible.




This is a second part of my squid with stapler digital drawings.

Drawings I've done (2009) + B&W paintings + Depths series & Under constant fire painting series

When I first started 3rd year, I had a lot of idea's running through my mind so I started with the easiest. Drawing was the cheapest thing that I could start with. I didn't really have enough money in the beginning of my 3rd year so I started out small.
(of course I eventually got a loan and got painting supplies and stuff)



Their are two drawings that I didn't finish because I moved on from what I was doing. The spider and the Bat. But when I showed these works for grading my professors were kinda assholes about it. Sometimes artist do things without any meaning, just because. but they always wanted an explanation for everything. I'm not one to make up shit about my work just to please people and I had small thoughts written down when I begin things.



I titled this work "The Birth of Memory" its actually quite a big drawing and at this moment its getting framed and will end up on my wall. I never really liked signing my work, I always thought that it took away from the piece. so I end up hiding my signature in the piece itself.

After my month of drawing in school, I started painting in black and white oil. They related back to my drawings and started to emerge from the canvas. What I mean is.. I started out with a completely black canvas and slowly etched my way through to what I wanted to emerge from it.



Doing this kind of painting perked my interest and I really started to enjoy it. Working with oils was a a lot easier than with acrylic. However I ended up getting bored with black and white and started drawing again, but in a different style then before. I stared using pointillism lots and lots of dots. I started drawing bees but I didn't really continue with it. I ended up adapting it to my painting style.



after these I showed my work in the studio for "Final Display" for the first semester. When we returned for second term I started painting fish and jelly fish.



This painting had a similar style to my black and white paintings, with the creature emerging from darkness. I stopped with the emerging creatures for a bit because of my grades. I got a C for this Angler painting and that really got to me. After I said FUCK IT! and I started painting jelly fish these paintings are in a series I called "Depths"



After this series I started another called " Under Constant Fire" in which I used war terminology for their names. Most of them are simple war terms but the pieces themselves turned out better than I could imagine. I had quite a few paintings in this series and the way that I painted these it allowed me to work on more than one at a time. ( I'm only going to post two pictures, the rest need to be re documented)



This Oil painting is 4 feet by 4 feet and is called Blitzkrieg. After this was taken I added dots to it to create more movement. it has about 5 layers of oil paint, each with its own drying time to show through to the final layer. Riot and Blitzkrieg were shown together along with Azmuth( similar to Riot but with blues and purple)



Riot was one of the best of this series, and won an award and was sold recently. Riot took over a month to finish, it has about 6 layers of oil paint, and each layer had a specific drying time. In order for the layers to show through and make the piece as vibrant as possible. I also entered this painting in the BMO 1st Art competition, but sadly didn't win( I was beat by a sculpture of bread.. how lame is that.)

I have more written about this piece somewhere. haha

As of this moment I've been working on writing up some things on some of my paintings, so sooner than later i'll have some of my work from college up and some gibber jabber to go along with it

dabbling with a surrealist twang

So far i've been working on this digital drawing for the past 5 hours.. and for some reason it still looks incomplete to me, Im still refining the edges and some of the darker and lighter tones

I thought I would share what i've been up to.

I don't know why I added the stapler... that was just a random thing that I was thinking about when I was playing with my photoshop. and I added extra legs for funnzies haha

I've been looking at a lot of surrealist art lately, mostly Dali. But I find it so visually stimulating. However when it comes to stuff like this, it falls more along the lines of illustration than anything else. I mean, i've done this kinda stuff before and especially when your in art college the professors tend to look down at stuff like this. Mainly because they don't consider illustration art. But isn't illustration just another form of a narrative? it tells a story, as does most of the art works i've seen and had the pleasure of reading about in my art history classes. So in a word... my professors are crazy for thinking that this kind of work isn't art.

one step forward, two steps back. Just can't win with some teachers. hahaha anyway back to work.



cheers

Back to the first

I don't know what it is about this one, but I keep on going back to it and adding stuff. Hair is probably the easiest this to do in photoshop, and using the different pressures with the wacom pad also adds a lot to it.

This digital drawing has a less noticeable gradient than my other gradient drawing.

I still don't know what to call this digital painting. It still needs a little more work



I find working with layers is a lot easier than drawing on paper, though I do love drawing in my sketch books and such its soo much easier to deal with mistakes when its digital and has layers that I can easily move through and change when I want.


I like sharing process photo's

at this moment, I'm experimenting with monochrome and Black and white and gradients.

Wacom Bamboo tablet

I got a drawing tablet for my birthday and I've never used a tablet to draw on the computer before.

this is the second drawing I did with my tablet, the first was a toad and well I just did that to get use to the tablet haaha

but this drawing isnt done yet tho.

I really like how using gradients and black and white

so I started reading my old text books again, I dont know why.. I guess that im just bored lol

gallery shtuff

I finally got word back from the Michael Gibson Gallery,Unfortunately they are booked up for the rest of the year. But the Curator that looked at my work was very helpful and gave me some excellent feed back. As of right now, I've been e-mailing back and forth to a little gallery in Toronto. I'll have to see what happens though but its existing none the less.

nothing is new on the art front im afraid. I've started to read my text books again just for my benefit. At this moment its like nothing inspires me anymore.

I know i'll find it again. my inspiration is somewhere