crappy hand of haiku

This is the final of El Caballo.  hope you enjoy!

A few weeks ago I got an email from Red Tree Gallery asking me to submit some of my work for their illustration show.  I think that they probably got my name off the Cincy Illustrators Blog and I was thrilled to be asked.  I haven't had anyone ask me to show anything before!  But that meant I needed to get things prepared.  Most of my paintings have the original used frames with them but some of them didn't come with frames at all. Luckily, I was able to find some great gems at the local salvation army.  In a past life, I used to be a picture framer.  It was one of my favorite jobs.  So I was able to use my framing skills to get all the paintings mounted and wired and ready to show publicly and not just in my basement. My next conundrum was price.  I have no idea how to price my work.  My instinct is to price low and I think that is only because it is hard for me to ask someone to buy something that I might not be able to afford.  ...

So today is Friday and that means meeting notes.  This morning, I was charged with trying to get a web conference going.  In order to test audio, I needed a song or video that was reliable and long.  Very long.  So of course I chose this. 10 hours of Jake singing about making bacon pancakes.  Once it starts it just doesn't stop...being entertaining!  It became a topic of discussion among confused meeting attendees that was just killing me.  So inadvertently, bacon pancakes became the overwhelming influence on today's sketches. First Bacon sketch    S'more Bacon   Cleaned up Bacon   I'm also submitting my work for an art show this weekend.  I'm going to see if they like my stuff, but it was cool to get asked! Wish me luck!

  I started working on this piece this weekend but I've been planning on this one for a while.   knew that I wanted to turn the geese in this image into dinosaurs.  I decided to use guache instead of acrylic since I wanted to have the freedom to work the dinosaurs skin a little bit while still being able to add the detail of the line work.   The piece was a little large for my scanner so I had to stitch four different pieces together to get this up onto the screen.  I hope everyone enjoys!

I know I've shared versions of this before, but I did a scan of the work today so you could see the final product (my cellphone pics didn't do the work justice).  I'm really happy with the way this turned out.  It scares my wife every time she sees it, but even she thinks it looks pretty good.  For this piece, I call RoboCharmer (the original is called Little Charmer), I chose to work with acrylic to start.  I never went to art school so much of my learning came from bits and pieces I've picked up off the internet.  The article that got me started painting was about the process that Mark Teague uses to make his wonderful paintings for his books (if you don't know Teague's work, he is now best known for his illustrations in the How do Dinosaurs... books).  That is where I learned that I needed to start with a toned underpainting which is a process I've used for almost all of my work.  I usually use burnt umber for its warming quality.   S...

This is a piece from sometime last year.  Its another thrift store detournement piece.  When I pulled this off my wall this morning, I totally forgot that I treated it with a layer of modge podge to try and unify my painting with the original.  It kind of worked.  I might try this again on my cobra commander  blue boy painting I finished this summer.  Happy Halloween, everybody!

AKA Garden of the Gods and Cats. I've been working on this on an off for a few weeks but decided to submit it to illustration friday.  This week's word is hidden so I thought this was appropriate.  One of the things I really like to do is go garage sale-ing for cheap prints that people don't want anymore (for instance, this colored picture of Garden of the Gods cost me $1 with a wonderful gold frame) and then paint something into them.  After I made a few of these, I learned that some artists call this detournement.   I just like making them.