Category Archives: art

Perfectly Wonderful

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wonderful_edited-1

I’m a tasteful nude.

This week has been pretty rough. Chronic pain is kicking my backside and I’m half the dragon I used to be. If that. It seemed like it would be fun to just color tonight but this took me 3 hours and the only part I like is the socks.

So, you know, art is about constantly exposing yourself. At least what I do is. Every night I sit here and ask myself, “Are you really going to share this with the world?” Yes. Yes, I am. That’s why I wear socks: so as not to get cold feet.

Here is the thing I drew tonight. People need to know that they’re OK the way they are. Exactly who they are. Dragons too. Even when they don’t feel OK.

Flying Sea Turtle Honeymoon Express Leaves Vancouver on Schedule

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Everybody climb aboard the Flying Sea Turtle Honeymoon Express!

Everybody climb aboard the Flying Sea Turtle Honeymoon Express!

At last I can reveal what I’ve been doing with every free second in which I had the ability to focus during the last 10 days! It’s a mosaic collage for my sister and brother-in-law! The had a civil ceremony on Tuesday, and their big wedding is going to be tomorrow. I haven’t given them this gift yet, but I can’t imagine my sister will be spending a lot of time on the Internet the day before she gets married.

I had a bunch of other ideas for their gift, but everything fell through and making something cool was the only reasonable option. I chose a sea turtle because I know they like turtles, and a Vancouver-inspired backdrop because that’s where they live.

You can't really see my pencil marks but I assure you I wasn't making this up as I went along.

You can’t really see my pencil marks but I assure you I wasn’t making this up as I went along.

I started out by purchasing a bunch of origami paper and this 11×14 board. I sketch out the islands in pencil, tore up the blue paper, sketched out the turtle on notebook paper (you can see a bit of it in the upper right hand corner) and generally chose colors for things.

Scenery coming together.

Scenery coming together.

Using matte medium, I began to mount the squares onto the board to form a background representing mountainous islands and their reflection in the water. I used a bunch of metallic and foil papers, which don’t photograph that well, because their colors change depending on the light. I would sort of like to make a shirt out of this design, but I’m not certain how well it will translate.

The turtle isn't mounted yet, but I needed to keep checking that it fit.

The turtle isn’t mounted yet, but I needed to keep checking that it fit.

Then I began the turtle. Using my original sketch, I cut out a silhouette, and then I created stencils for the individual pieces of the turtle by slowing dismantling the sketch. You can see the diminished remains of the sketch to the right. The metallic background paper is orange, with green streaks if you turn it in the light.

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I’m a delightful creature!

Here, the turtle is complete. Just the details on each flipper took about 20 minutes. The turtle itself probably took 4 or 5 hours. It wasn’t as easy to do such fine work as it used to be; my body doesn’t want to sit for that long at a stretch, and my eyes don’t want to focus on tiny details, and my hands tire easily, especially cutting small pieces like the skin texture. Now the sketch is in 50 pieces scattered all over the office.

Somehow I neglected to photograph the process for the man and woman riding the turtle, but if you scroll back up you can see them, although I wonder if their colors ought to be brighter and more contrasting. Well, like everything, I learned a lot. If I did it again, it would be different and possibly better, but there’s no way I could do this again. Maybe another animal.

So, all in all, the completed project probably took close to 20 hours. I lose track of time when I’m working. Sometimes I have to keep Netflix playing, even though I’m not watching, just so I have a way to mark the passage of time and remind me how many hours I’ve been sitting there.

Congratulate my sister on her nuptials if you know her!

We are all connected

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My blue period lasted until I was 35. Now I'm in my rainbow period.

My blue period lasted until I was 35. Now I’m in my rainbow period.

Here’s a few more sketchy flights of fancy from my Trickster’s Hat days. There’s something so soft about pencil drawings, and especially velvety about color pencil. When I was a teenager I used to spend a lot of babysitting money on artist quality colored pencils, but I think this drawing was done with school supplies. I used to covet colored pencil–any arts supplies–so badly. Now I have dozens of sets of colored pencils, and I spent most of my time on the tablet.

Don't mess with Little Red

Don’t mess with Little Red

Little Red Riding Hood again, this time a dark, brooding raven of a riding hood. Here’s one little girl who’s not afraid to walk through the forest. She’s more than a match for this brutally psychedelic world.

OK, back to the passion flower! When that’s finished, I may take a break from the tablet and get back to basics.

Zentanglement

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All Sharpies, all the time: black, red, silver.

All Sharpies, all the time: black, red, silver.

I’ve seen some people call this kind of free form, stream of consciousness, space filling doodle a Zen Tangle, but I was doing them for decades before I realized that people outside my family drew like this. My mom doodled constantly on the backs of envelopes and the edges of calendars, in a style similar to this. Typically, it’s an absent-minded thing: I would mostly do it on the edge of school papers and the margins of notebooks. Supposedly it’s a soothing, centering thing, like a mandala, but without the rigidity and focus.

This one I did in a single sitting. It took an hour, and it seems kind of threadbare to me, but it was definitely helpful in terms of getting my head out of video mode and into art mode. Usually, when I’m just doing it absent mindedly, a lot more ink gets on the page.

If there’s a pen in my hand, I want to use it, even if I’m just drawing hearts or writing the alphabet over and over. It feels good to draw

Further adventures in line drawing

Two more examples: on the left, black and silver Sharpies; on the right, the back of a save the date card from our wedding.

If you can’t make something representative, at least you can make something.

I’m working on a new T-shirt design, which should be pretty stunning when it’s done. When I started I said, “Hey, you can pull this off in a night.” After 3 days of drawing, I’m about halfway done. It will be a digital painting of a passion flower, which is an astonishingly bizarre sight, and more so because they only bloom a couple days out of the year. So that will be exciting. It’s been a while since I’ve uploaded a new design.

Yesterday, by the way, I sold 2 giralicorn pillows. They look like this:

This is what a giralicorn throw pillow looks like.

This is what a giralicorn throw pillow looks like.

I wish I could meet the customer who made this purchase. I imagine the person who wants to decorate their home with not one, but 2 of these creations, is probably a fairly interesting individual. Perhaps even more interesting than I am, because I drew this picture, but don’t see any way in which an item like this would fit in with my home decor.

My Nephew Goes Wading, Take 2

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My brother emailed me asking if I could send him a high-res version of “My Nephew Goes Wading,” the little doodle I scrawled out a while back when I was working on “My Sister and Brother-in-Law Look to the Future.” I sent him the files but really, it was just a scribble. I always meant to paint it. He wanted an art print or something! It was just a few lines. So, the last few days have been dedicated to fleshing it out.

It's hard to capture the joy on her face.

It’s hard to  accurately capture the joy on his face.

It’s not quite 100% satisfactory yet. In small format it looks good but for a blown up version it’s not quite there. Maybe in the next day or so.

Digital paint has a lot of advantages over real paint; it’s less messy, and it’s easier to take back, paint over, or adjust mistakes. It’s cheaper. It smells better. But…it’s still nice to have real materials (which I can’t afford right now so whatever). Painting is for the wealthy, or for people with patrons.

Anyway, “My Nephew Goes Wading, Redux.” I can get better with practice. I know I can.

Paint It Whatever Color

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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!

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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.