So you can tell I forgot to take a photo when I mocked in all the shapes with brown paint (er… Burnt Umber Light, if you’re in to knowing details.)

I then started adding a green under-painting for the flesh, trying to fix the details where my brown mockup was incorrect. I really tried to fix the hands, but as you can see, they need a lot more work. (And, ug, the legs are WAY too long from the knees down, but whatever, nothing is perfect in life, I guess.)

I started adding in the green under painting for the vines and things covering the arms, but then realized that for an under painting to really work, you sort of need to use a complementary color. Well, I don’t know if you have to, but I just sort of like to. It makes the paint that you lay on over top really sort of… stand out. It creates depth without having to put on layer after layer of glaze (although, I do plan to go back in and do that at the end of the painting.

I then called my friend and she agreed that I should under paint the trees and leafy areas all in reds, so I started doing that. I started out trying to create all the detail work right away, but then got bored and just started to do red washes everywhere, so that I’d feel like I’d actually accomplished something. Now I get to go back in and work out the details, because everything is really still blocky. Ug. Still all in red.

I like painting big because you can get all the details in, but I’m too impatient of a person to deal with how long this stuff takes. But I’m trying. Patience can be learned, I think.

wasteland mostly finished

I think I inserted this image incorrectly. Which just goes to show, as soon as you think you know what you’re doing, you’re going to mess it up.

This is the beast that I turned in for my American Landscapes assignment. Before anyone questions how I managed to create Fallout3-porn for a finals assignment, let me tell you: I am clever!

We had to read an essay early on in the class by Phillip Fisher called Hard Facts – Setting and Form in the American Novel. I found myself reading it and wondering how the essay would have read if he’d included things like zombie-apocalypse, and “after the bomb” fiction.

I want to say that I was able to talk the teacher into letting me write the essay (and paint the painting) because I was using Fisher as a model, but I think the honest truth is that sometimes teachers get bored with reading the same old-same old, and they’ll let you try things out if it sounds interesting. Either way, there’s the painting.

Also, I’ll have to take some detail shots (and learn how to photograph wet paint so it doesn’t glare so much) to show what I’m going to do to this painting next, when it dries.

Also-also, (if you’re into this nerdy-art stuff) I am totally planning on getting some new oil mediums, and I am super excited to try them out! They’re hand-blended, or hand-ground, or “hand” something. I’ve been using a mystery oil medium that I made, and while it’s pretty good, I’m starting to run out of it. I want to say it was (after looking through all my crappy notes) just a traditional blend of OMS (gamsol) and refined linseed (gamblin) – I can’t remember the mixture either. 50/50? No, too much gamsol breaks down the binding, so maybe 40/60? I’ve no idea. I think (maybe?) I might have added a little gelkid in there too, but… maybe not?

Really, I just want to buy some medium, and keep a receipt so I know what to get when I run out. Alchemy is really something I shouldn’t be trusted with. Someday I’ll tell you all the full story about how I made black oil, and what a bitch it was finding asbestos to cook on (I never found any) and how hard it is to find powdered lead (I DID find this) and how agonizing it is trying not to breathe while cooking it, ( …this may explain some things, really) while waiting for the oil and the lead to simmer and turn from a bright orange (who knew?!) into a black.

Actually, maybe not telling the full story is better. This way your imagination can fill in the rest. That makes it YOUR story, and that’s way better than anything I can give you. Just, uh, know that I have a bottle of black lead medium that I’m too afraid to use.

I wanted to get all the mid-ground buildings in by last night, so that all I’d have to do is the bottom third or so and then be done. It didn’t work out that way though. After a while, my hand starts to shake (which isn’t the bad part) but then I start to get sloppy, mentally, where I just sort of “don’t care” or stop “paying attention” to what it is that I’m doing. THAT is the troublesome part.

Also, I learned how to make captions using the gallery add-on. That’s pretty cool.

I wanted more of the red to show through, but then again, I always get really attached to my under paintings. There’s still bits where the red shows through, and I think that’s pretty nice too. The sky in the background is a sort of smokey orange (does that come through on your computer?) and I’m pretty pleased with that too.

Now, I guess I need to finish this so that I can get back to doing real work. Like web comics.

I’m pretty excited about this painting. It’s coming along nicely – right now it’s acrylic, but I’ll put some layers of oil on as soon as I remember to bring my painting supplies home from the studio.

These also show my process: anything to cover up the white of the canvas. I threw on some red and brown in quick strokes, and then after that dried, I went in with a mixture of blue, brown, red, and green to make a muddy sort of black. With that darker colour I then started sketching out ideas. When the lines were mostly where I wanted them, I started going in with washes of white to see where I want the light to fall on my ruined city. I’m still working that part out, but I’m still pretty pleased with this.

I’ve only ONE essay left to write, a landscape painting to do, and a bunch of art left to work on, and then maybe some studying for the finals, and then I am ready to start working on some comics! Yeah!

Also I’m starting a kickstarter to get All the Growing Things printed. I’ll link to that once I launch, but for now, let me just say that making a video of yourself is torturous, unless you’re into that.

(No judgements if you are into that. It takes all kinds. Even kinds that like making videos f themselves.)

A few years back I took a “Women in Art” class. We ended up discussing some of the famous female artists from early Renaissance all the way up to modern day artists of today, as well as what kind of work they’d make compared to their male counterparts.  The teacher always liked to start the class with Gentileschi’s vs Caravaggio’s “Judith Beheading Holofernes” side by side on the projector. (It usually put the male students into a fighting stance to walk in and see that first class.)

I’ve spent a long while trying to figure out what, exactly, is the “male gaze” and trying to understand why it is that women can be depicted in art and still be “artsy” but that the male nude isn’t really considered “art.” I mean, sure, there’s Michaelangelo’s David, who is a super-ripped muscley dude… I guess you can have a few nude males in art and count it as “art”. I had an art teacher tell another student that “women were beautiful, and that men were not” and that was why it’s “better” to paint women and not men.

But then again, I’ve never been that good at following instructions, and I’m still trying to figure all this stuff out. Personally, I think men are beautiful to look at.

So, that’s my attempt to explain what has been going on in  my head while I’ve been painting this weekend, but mostly I’ve been trying to figure out how to draw a face where the head looks like it’s going back in space so that you can see up the nose, without getting focused on just the nose.

Here is the painting that I started on Saturday:

Here it is Saturday evening when I went to bed:

Also, my husband introduced this painting as, “…and here is my penis…” to his friends.

Here it is today (Sunday) where I’m leaving off for the evening:

Fun fact: There are plenty of tropes of “the sleeping king” or “the giant under the mountain” or things like that, (which tend to be a bit jingoistic/nationalist) but there really aren’t much about “sleeping women” other than… well, Sleeping Beauty, I guess. Maybe it’s that those are lumped under the trope of “damsel in distress”? Also, there are no male analogies to Ophelia, which is weird, considering how some of that Romantic poetry gets a little… emotional… at times.

Yep, and if this under-painting reminds you of Waterhouse’s Ophelia, then that’s exactly what I’m going for. Sort of. But with plants and trees and things.

Bah, I don’t have half a clue as to what it is I’m talking about, do I?

First thing first: Danielle Miller was kind enough to give me two 8′ x 4′ giant boards to paint on! Me being me (which translates to me being too afraid to paint over the things she’d already painted on them), I stretched canvas over the boards, and then obsessively gessoed and sanded the canvas.

Now the canvas is so pretty I took a picture.

I also thought it’d be fun for you all to see what my studio now looks like. Mind you, I only took a photo of the clean part of the studio, and I carefully made sure you don’t see the floor or any of that stuff either. But I included the dog. Dogs are a vital part of every studio, I think.

Also, I tend to squirt the dog, not as a corrective or behaviour sort of squirt, but rather in the sense of a practical joke. She doesn’t think it’s all that funny but then the victims of practical jokes never do, do they?

Procrastination Number TWO: I’m getting ready to set up a Kickstarter project, and I’m working on some of the rewards:

These are some of the hand-pulled prints I’ll be making. I’m not actually a printer (in the artsy sense) so I really don’t know if they’re called “hand-pulled” or not, but it sounds good, doesn’t it? I guess I could also call them “Organic, Free-Range, Art Items” or something similar. I still need to create a fifth one. Then I’ll test them all out to see if they print alright, and if they don’t I’ll redraw a different one.

If you’re into knowing how things are made, these are actually styrofoam food take-away cartons that I’ve cut down. I then draw on them with a ballpoint pen. I’m trying a new thing where I use a micro pen – I want to see if I can get more detail than I’ve previously been getting. That’s not to say they don’t come out awesome, because they do, but I tend to like to cram as much detail into things as I can.

Hm… I guess that’s THREE ways to procrastinate, now that I think of it, if we count working on this post! Still, I’ve some essays to write for tomorrow, and I’ve two comic pages to draw for tomorrow and Friday.

Honestly, community college was wonderful, and thank goodness for it – without community college so many of us wouldn’t ever really have a chance at higher education.

However, in keeping with the college theme, today marks the middle of Spring Break. Ah, spring break, what a tease – you are too short! I thought that to keep in the spirit of spring break that I’d take a look in the liquor cabinet and make a pina colada. That’s right, only fancy drinks for me!

Sadly, I hardly ever drink, so other than the elderly rum that has been slowly turning into… I don’t know what rum turns into… vinegar? Raisin extract? No, wait, rum is made with sugar, right? So… Sugar extract? Well, whatever, it tasted like raisins.

Besides the weird raisin rum, I found a stash of home-made candy from the winter holidays! In a sense, it was a brilliant hiding place! I… okay, this is shameful, but yes, I hide candy from myself. The problem is that I have little-to-no self restraint. It’s a character flaw. So I hid the candy in the liquor cabinet (since I so rarely drink), and now that it’s mid-March I found it again!

Raisin rum forgotten, I went to town on the candy; I mean, it is Spring Break after all, a time to let loose after all those awful midterms (mine were on Minimalist Artists *shudders*).  I hadn’t know that the candy was in there, but after finding it, I knew I had to have it, all of it, or my life just wouldn’t be complete.

Besides, you wouldn’t want home-made candy to go bad or stale, would you?!

Mind you, I’m a little curious where it came from. Who it came from. I’m guessing either Liz or Lynn. Liz likes to make treats, and Lynn’s mom makes her bake during the holidays (once there was pie), so either of them could have made them. They were candied pecans.

Were.

And I’d like some more, please.