Category Archives: art

Paint It Whatever Color

Leave a reply

Papier-mâché is an interesting looking word if you spell it with the French accents. There’s something both gratifying and disgusting about the process of creating it, though. Although I am far from fastidious in my personal habits, I despise being actively, tackily sticky or dirty, particularly when it involves my hands and arms. But for certain things, like baking bread or making papier-mâché, I’m willing to make an exception.

Family photo, Montezuma Castle

Family photo, Montezuma Castle

The 9-year-old came home a couple weeks back with an assignment to build an ancient Indian dwelling based on the design of some group of people who lived in Arizona, and her first choice of dwelling was Montezuma Castle, the most striking ruins site we visited on our recent tour of Arizona. Immediately, my brain started kicking the idea around. How could this idea come to fruition?

Papier-mâché was the answer.

I can’t really count this piece as my art. I designed it, and I told the kid how to make it, and I made her do most of the work—say, about 90%—without my interference, although I did come to her rescue when something was beyond her ability, and I stepped in for some of the fine detail work: cutting windows out with a scalpel, the parts that entailed using India ink, and placing the buildings in the cave. I also mixed her paint colors. Otherwise, she was in charge of creating this thing.

This seems like a pretty successful project to my eyes!

Montezuma Castle, executed in paper and paste: probably the best ancient Indian dwelling in all of 4th grade.

 

I confess that she was having so much fun painting that I couldn’t stop myself from helping. Anyway, it was getting late and she’s so meticulous and I needed to clean up and make dinner. I especially love the little accents I did on the front when she pointed out the real cliff had a lot more texture. I love painting and am certain that I would not suck at it if given half a chance.

Later that night, after the kids went to their mom’s, The Man was fooling around with the leftover materials, specifically the other half of the balloon shape we used to create the cave.

The other half of the cave. Note its specific shape.

The other half of the cave. Note its specific shape.

“It fits perfectly on your head,” he declared after determining that it was too small for his gigantic noggin. Then he stuck it on my head. In fact, it did fit perfectly.

Now, if you’re like me, in the sense that you really like dragons, and art, and the Internet, and have a lot of friends, you have probably seen/been sent this time lapse video of papier-mâché dragon being built. While I am not as good as the professional guy in the video (yet), I am not bad either, and after the second time the video appeared on my Facebook feed, and after wearing this paper hat around for a while, I decided to create a dragon hat. Yesterday I started the horns; today I hope to finish them and affix them, and then turn my attention to the problem of building something to fit over my head when I haven’t got a mold of my face and I’m not willing to get flour paste in my hair.

Of course, now the girl wants a Maleficent headdress  executed in the same style.

Since I didn’t really show you any of my actual work today, here’s another picture from earlier in the year, which was a request from some good friends who were getting married and wanted an agave sign for outside the venue. Aside from the Trickster’s Hat stuff, it’s really the only painting I’ve done in a long time. I’d love to learn more about the craft.

Their colors were springtime green and bubblegum pink.

Their colors were springtime green and bubblegum pink. It was windy on the hill; here we see the “ring bear” affixing the sign to the easel to keep it from blowing away.

 

Another Day, Another Dragon

Leave a reply

Specifically, another day, another dragon painted on a wineglass at a rollicking good time Yelp event.

 

The head of the wyrm.

The head of the wyrm.

Technically, the Dragon painted on this wineglass is an amphithere: a winged, legless beast. The amphithere is a New World dragon. Purple mountains majesty!

The landscape is painted on the reverse side of the glass.

The landscape is painted on the reverse side of the glass.

The Yelp event at which I painted this glass was the Winter Zootacular, an event to benefit gibbons, according to the invitation. The glass painting table was hosted by a company whose name I immediately forgot. Not only can you paint wineglasses there, they will also give you wine to drink while you paint them. That is the business model.

IMG_9148

Closeup on the wing. Amphitheres are distinguished from European and Asian dragons by their feathery wings.

I’m interested in spending a lot more time painting. The Fox was with me at this event, and wasn’t interested in painting wineglasses, and I didn’t want to make him hang around. Plus, it was dark, and there were 50 other women crowded around me. I bet I could paint a way better dragon on a wineglass in more favorable circumstances.

 

All Dragon, All the Time

Leave a reply

It’s not going to be forever.

Dragon Comics are definitely a finite thing. There’s no termination date or anything like that, but there are other projects in my mind, projects planned out more carefully than this one.

That said, there is a lot of Dragon.

Last week, at a Yelp Elite event, there was a wineglass painting station, and somehow, Dragon turned up there!

That snake would drive anyone to drink.

That snake would drive anyone to drink.

Then, because people were leaving and there were still undecorated wineglasses, I added a mandala to the night’s accomplishments.

Mandala wineglass is on the right, seen with Dragon and a bunch of other decorated wineglasses.

Mandala wineglass is on the right, seen with Dragon and a bunch of other decorated wineglasses.

I rarely drink, and when I do, it’s usually from my buddy Jeff’s Woodeye Glasses, so they’re just sitting on the bookshelf right now, but if I ever get that Kickstarter together, these glasses will probably be a reward.

There's nothing like other people's badly drawn rendition of your badly drawn characters.

There’s nothing like other people’s badly drawn rendition of your badly drawn characters.

But that’s not all the Dragon. You see, this little dragon is about to have a birthday. One of the big ones. And her kind friends threw her a rather intimate little party. And Dragon even turned up there.

I don’t eat vast quantities of cake, or dessert in general, since I have a very low tolerance for flour and sugar. But this treat came from a local bakery called Cakelab, which specializes in gluten-free desserts. So I ate about 10 times as much sugar this weekend as I would normally eat in a year. And I’m kind of feeling it, if you know what I mean. Ouch. The cake is delicious, though. 

So, Dragon is pleasing to people, and Dragon is a stepping stone to something else. But right now, Dragon is ubiquitous. I still have one more comic in this little arc, plus a standalone for Friday, with humor that’s terribly nerdy and not at all black. The world is dark sometimes, and so is my sense of humor, but it’s all in good fun. You’re having fun, right?

Road Trip Memorabilia

2 Replies

The day before we left on our epic Grand Canyon adventure, I was at Target looking for things to entertain kids when a thought occurred to me. The Man doesn’t use printed maps anymore, depending entirely on his phone for directions, so I thought it would be fun for the kids to buy a state map and mark our route on it as we traveled. It could provide a sense of perspective that you don’t get from a 5.7 inch diagonal display (The Man is a fan of his ZMAX phablet).

But what would we do with this map afterward? Would its destiny be to moulder amongst other forgotten relics of road trips past?

Perhaps influenced by my Trickster’s Hat experiments, I had another idea. I saved up all the ephemera from the trip (national park handouts and such) and printed out a couple dozen photos. (When was the last time I printed out photos? Maybe 2006! We didn’t even print our wedding pictures.) Then I mounted the photos on the map.

6 days of no holds barred sightseeing, compressed into a single rectangle.

6 days of no holds barred sightseeing, compressed into a single rectangle.

As it turned out, there wasn’t room for the ephemera. There were empty spaces, but none big enough for the inset maps or other things. Instead, I printed out a second round of photos with small details like flowers, petroglyphs, and animals, and added them like marginalia.

Close up on (most of) the route.

Close up on (most of) the route.

Then I remarked the route, color-coding it by day so you can easily see where we drove on each leg of the journey. We were gone for 6 days, which allowed me to make the color code a rainbow. Then I bordered each photo with the corresponding color so you can easily see on which day any particular image was taken.

Use this product to stick things to paper.

Use this product to stick things to paper.

This project is perhaps a bit craftier (rather than artier) than the stuff I usually do. As evidence, I present this glue product. I wasn’t sure what to use, so I asked the Cat, who is an accomplished scrapbooker. She recommended this stuff, which is a very sticky glue loosely affiliated with a waxy tape. You just run the device over the thing you wish to glue and the glue transfers effortlessly from the tape to your picture, and doesn’t wrinkle the paper like some glue does.

You have to be careful because it is extremely sticky. If you run the device over a spot you’ve already gotten glue on, it can jam the works; and once you place your image, it’s pretty difficult to get it back up again, so you need to get it right the first time.

I had the map professionally framed, because it’s a weird size and there was no way I could buy a frame off the rack. Although lately I wonder if I ought to learn how to frame things myself. They mounted it and made it look quite professional, and I picked it up this afternoon. The kids loved it. The framers loved it too.

Detail from days 5 and 6: hiking Boyton Canyon and the Sinagua ruins near Sedona.

Detail from days 5 and 6: hiking Boyton Canyon and the Sinagua ruins near Sedona.

 

3-Dimensional Dragon!

Leave a reply

One of the obstacles I must overcome as I learn to draw is that I personally lack almost any true form of depth perception. Most of my life, I’ve exhibited a condition known as strabismus exotropia; I am typically either seeing through my left eye or my right eye, but, as a general rule, not both eyes at the same time. Whereas most people receive stereo data from two points, which are combined by the brain into one three-dimensional picture, people with exotropia lack binocular vision and tend to perceive the world as being somewhat flat.

Although I wear rather extreme prism lenses for this condition, they only really work to a distance of a few feet, and then only rarely, when I’m well rested and looking intently at something in ideal lighting conditions. At the slightest hint of eye strain, one eye will bow out and let the other soldier on alone, only shouldering the burden when the other eye throws in the towel.

I get a lot of headaches.

More to the point, this means that I have to work extra hard to understand depth. Dimensionality takes a lot of extra effort.

In order to draw yesterday’s comic, I wanted some way to be certain that what I guessed Dragon’s front view would look like actually reflected what Dragon’s front view would look like. To that end, I made a 3-dimensional Dragon in Sculpey.

Look, Ma! No eyes!

Look, Ma! No eyes!

There’s the proof. No eyes.

I wanted this model for other reasons as well, to help me begin experimenting with dimensionality and perspective in this comic, so I could see Dragon from various angles and understand how the body would appear, and how the different parts might move.

Well, hello there, gorgeous!

Well, hello there, gorgeous!

This model is just under 3 inches high, which is fairly big for a baked clay model. In order to create a figure of this size that could stand alone on 2 legs, I needed to prop it up with a scaffolding (eventually, 3 unopened bars of Sculpey) as I was building it, and then offer it some extra support in the oven (provide by a small glass dish and a strategically placed knife and spoon).

Even so, Dragon does seem a bit off kilter, weaving to one side like a drunk college freshman walking into a big dance. Plus, those finger nails are off the hook; I gave up on keeping them straight long before Dragon got in the oven. I’m frankly amazed they’re still attached, considering how all the little details fell off my last set of Sculpey models. Although it’s easier to work with, in many ways, than real clay, it’s not as strong or sturdy.

Can I help you?

Can I help you?

I tried to make both sides a little different, but the way the figure settled in the oven pulled it lopsided anyway. Still, this should be an effective tool.

 

 

 

Please like this page

Leave a reply

Not that I precisely understand Facebook’s algorithms, but it seems pretty likely to me that Facebook doesn’t like it when you link to the same blog every single day. When I first started blogging, it seems like I actually got a lot more traffic, and a lot more Facebook likes. Now it’s leveled off, so my assumption is that Facebook isn’t showing my updates to as many people, which means fewer people are liking them, which means fewer people are seeing them. A vicious circle.

Lacking a publicity budget and not being overly active on any other forums, it’s hard to see how to increase my reach. Unless my work is so great that everyone who reads it just naturally and organically shares it. OK: generate better work so that people just naturally like and share it.

I *can* get better with practice. But do I?

I *can* get better with practice. But do I?

For most of my life, I was the type of person who either took immediately to a new skill, or gave up immediately on a new skill. It’s fortunate (or, possibly, the cause of this behavior) that I found myself naturally good at enough things that it was not immediately apparent that I was a quitter, or that I wasn’t learning certain important skills. (Seriously, I don’t think I knew my 12 times tables until college.) Not until my 30s did it ever seem imperative to me that subpar skills should be honed, that time should be spent doing things I wasn’t good at. So the Dragon “I can get better with practice” comic still amuses me, and guides me. It can guide you too, if you carry it around with you at all times and refer to it for guidance in times of need.

I stand by this princess.

I stand by this princess.

Getting better still isn’t a guarantee of success, which is another life lesson for me. Take Princess Sealestia of Aquastria. Although she’s a simple drawing, she took me about a month to complete, primarily because I had no idea what I was doing and had to learn the skills as I went. She still cracks me up. She still seems like a great idea to me. She gets more page views than any other design in my RedBubble shop. She gets compliments, too. But no one seems to want to take her home. Why not? She’s adorable. She’s available as a sticker for $2.32. That makes her versatile. She could be a smartphone case, or a notebook cover, or a window decal.

That cat is never going to get tired of that fish.

That cat is never going to get tired of that fish.

And finally, being worse isn’t an indicator of failure. It is certain that my writing is objectively better than that of Stephanie Meyers, but it isn’t more successful. I don’t think “Kitty Sees 3 Fishes” is a masterpiece; it’s the oldest drawing in the shop, and it’s actually something I dashed out in a few minutes. In fact, I think I spent more time converting it to a digital format than I did painting it. But it’s one of my most successful designs. How? Why? Should I be doing more in this vein? The idea of the picture still amuses me. But as an older, more accomplished artist, I look at this image and think, “Where are kitty’s feet?”

Anyway, this is a blog post, and these are 3 items in my shop. Do with them as you will. (I hope what you will do is like and share them with your social networks and expose more people to the magic of QWERTYvsDvorak.)

One Hundred!

Leave a reply

Happy 100 blog posts to me!

Ooohh...cake...

Ooohh…cake…

I’m curious about how the above image came to be, since it’s not at all what I intended to draw. In hindsight, the thing I was going to draw would work better as a Valentine, so I’ll just save it. Plus, I can reuse the cake image if/when I get to 100 Dragon Comics! Anyway, 100 blog posts. A couple hundred pieces of art. It’s something! Yes! It’s not nothing.

To celebrate this milestone accomplishment, here’s some more of what I do. We’ve got mandalas!

 

An early plant-based design.

An early plant-based design.

The first couple dozen mandalas I did in this series were drawn on the flip side of the crossword pages hubby used to print out every day, but we’re rapidly reaching the end of these. When I started to take the project a bit more seriously, I used fresh paper without an image bleeding through the other side.

Beautifully blue

Beautifully blue

As I’ve mentioned before, my “blue period” was about 30 years long. Usually, I make a conscious decision to not draw everything in blue. But sometimes it’s nice to get back to your roots.

And speaking of roots, here’s a lovely dragon for your pleasure.

Crustofer, a Microscopic Aquatic Dragon

Crustofer, a Microscopic Aquatic Dragon

I think I’m more pleased with Crustofer’s appellation than his image, although he’s a cute little dragon. I guess a microscopic aquatic dragon would be considered a cryptozooplankton?

There you have it. Dragons and mandalas. As always, if you think my work doesn’t completely suck, please consider shopping my store. Stickers and notecards are only a couple dollars, and while the clothes may run a couple bucks more than in other T-shirt shops, the money does go to support an artist. If you’d like a T-shirt featuring any work on this site that isn’t in the store, drop me a line and, if I can, I’ll get it onto a shirt for you. If you’d rather buy a book off Amazon, you could also support me by clicking any book link on my Amazon Affiliate book review site. You don’t have to buy that particular book; any book you buy after clicking one of my links will refer a small percentage back to me and I will be one step closer to my goal of making money more or less on my own terms. Otherwise, I will have to go back to copywriting, and believe me, no one wants that.

 

The Desert Explodes in Glorious Technicolor

1 Reply

For ten years, I’ve lived in the Sonoran Desert, where we enjoy 330 days of sunshine every year. It may be hot, but it is also beautiful, full of sharp contrasts and luscious details.

This agave had reached the end of its life cycle. After sending up the shoot and flowering, the plant will die, but for a brief, breathtaking moment, it resembles a flaming torch.

If all else fails, you can always make tequila.

If all else fails, you can always make tequila.

This drawing is based on a photograph I took over the summer; I had a 2-day window in which this plant exhibited these gorgeous colors. In fact, I wanted to paint a hibiscus today, but I couldn’t lay my hands on the right reference image.

This lovely design is available for purchased on a variety of fine products in my shop.

Thursday, Take Me Away!

Leave a reply

For your consideration, a brief gallery of potentially enlightening or confusing images.

Hissteria, a confounding dragon. I suspect that Hissteria mesmerizes you, and then eats you.

Hissteria, a confounding dragon. I suspect that Hissteria mesmerizes you, and then eats you.

There is something very pleasing to me about this dragon’s dimensionality and weirdness. I can see her twisting in the wind, like those flying snakes that turn their bodies into sails, except Hissteria is more of a corkscrew. As you squint at her spiraling form, asking your spouse, “What is that thing? Do you see it? What is it?” Hissteria strikes, devouring you headfirst. Or maybe she’s just misunderstood.

A well-formed mandala

A well-formed mandala

Here’s your weekly mandala; this is a fairly regular one, with hints of traditional quilt design along with some of the crystal theme that I examine more later.

A small percentage of the mandalas in this collection were pieces I worked on a bit but never felt satisfied with. I never threw any out, but there are some that certainly feel unfinished, and also at a dead end. This is one of them:

Actually, something about it feels kind of subatomic to me. This mandala is not as disappointing as it originally seemed.

Actually, something about it feels kind of subatomic to me. This mandala is not as disappointing as it originally seemed.

Dragon Comics 14

Leave a reply

OK, I love this comic. I mean, I must have rewritten Rabbit’s dialog in the 2nd panel 12 times, and I’m still not completely satisfied, but this is precisely what I want to be doing: talking about serious things, and then flipping a switch and falling into a punchline.

This is another best viewed as large as your monitor can handle it, particularly the last panel.

When you don't wear clothes, body paint is pretty much the only way to add color to your wardrobe.

When you don’t wear clothes, body paint is pretty much the only way to add color to your wardrobe.

If you are not familiar with the work of Mondrian, check out this quick GIS. You’ve probably seen it, even if you don’t know his name. In fact, I’m only familiar with his name because I was on the forensics team in high school, in the “oral interpretation” division (i.e. reading out loud) and one of my pieces was Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ said the Ticktockman,” in which Mondrian is a summation of all that’s wrong with a rigid and orderly mandate in a modern, automated world. I’m not fond of the aesthetic myself.

Of course, Rabbit is adorning Dragon with the iconic image of Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” which most people are more familiar with. I have the print hanging on my bedroom door. I’ve also seen it held out as a piece beloved by people who took one art class in college and haven’t looked at a painting since then, but, obviously, I don’t have any space to be snooty about art. It’s a beautiful painting even divorced of meaning, and it had a lot of personal meaning for me. It very much is a work that, to me, expresses the kind of deep connection to the universe, intertwined with awe and wonder for the universe, that I feel when I look at a sunset or a storm cloud.

I learned a lot from studying Van Gogh’s “Blue Irises in a Yellow Vase“; from copying “The Starry Night” I basically learned how freaking amazing Van Gogh was. Do you have any idea how many colors there are in this picture? A lot. Even looking at a very good copy (I recall seeing 3D reproductions that actually used scanning technology to recreate his brushstrokes) you don’t see as deeply into the nuances as you do when you get down to the pixels. Wow. Just wow. I spent more time on “The Starry Night” than I did on anything else this week.