A trio of chicken portraits
Chicken portrait trio • 8″ x 10″ each
I enjoy painting portraits of pets, and my latest commission was especially fun: pet chickens! I had a good baseline about how chickens look and act from having an occasional pet chicken (or chickens) while growing up.
Even though I may only end up working with one reference image, it helps to see a few different ones to get a sense of their personalities. That also give me more options to find which ones will look best as portraits. Additional references always help too. I ended up shifted them around a little bit – adjusting their heads and necks – to get a consistent size and approach for all three. I mocked up a few different approaches for colors and name labels, and what you see here is the winner.
I use my traditional color layering technique here: starting with the warms tones and then layering in the real colors. Since each chicken had distinctly different colors, I put each on a vignette-style background tinted with a color similar to them. The highlights are often the most satisfying parts to paint, and I enjoyed the eyes and combs especially.
Side note: working with oval canvases is surprisingly tricky for alignment. Canvas has its own tooth and angles, and I got led astray by it a few times while sketching these out. It’s oddly challenging to set an oval upright, especially when there’s a pattern pulling in another direction. They look lovely, though – worth it!
Initial pencil sketches
Yellow ochre
Burnt sienna
Burnt umber
Layers of color
Ginny
Hermione
Luna
Shimmer
Shimmer • 12″ x 12″
Continuing the tradition of creating new works to donate to the annual Works/San José benefit auction (see 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014) – here’s one that echoes some of the artful cropping of the Statement paintings but with a new subject matter. The translucency of the tail and the shine on the scales caught my eye most, and I decided to make those the focus of this painting. Check out the auction details here – silent auction completes on Saturday December 8th!
I started this one off at a Two Buck Tuesday at Kaleid Gallery, and painted a portion of it during Street MRKT (an outdoor evening event) which lead to some interesting color choices due to the yellow street lights. The background on my reference photo was very busy so I tried out a bokeh-style blurring. This may be my go-to technique now: small dots to soften edges, big dots to obscure details.
Sketch first
Yellow ochre
Burnt sienna
Burnt umber
Outgrowth I
Outgrowth I • 12″ x 24″
I haven’t done many abstract works so this is a bit of an exploration for me. This is a painting I started a while ago – 2004 – and put on pause while I debated what to do with it. I got inspired to pick it up again and figure out what else it needed. It had the structure I wanted with the teal background and branching green shape. It was just a tad…sparse.
I decided it needed to propagate in two ways:
- in a generative way, like an algorithm riffing on a repeating pattern
- in a natural way, like the blooming of spores or moss
That guided the color and details choices I made to fill this in. I’d like to try more in this style so in the spirit of that I’ve given this a number. May it be the first in a series!
Earlier in the process: the “pause”
“10th Annual 50|50 Show” at Sanchez Art Center
For 50 days through June and July, I painted a series of gesture paintings. I enlisted 24 models (plus me, for one of these) for variety…and also to involve friends, family, and co-workers along the way,
Here are all fifty gestures. They’re each 6″ x 6″, and will be available at Sanchez Art Center on a first-come first-serve basis during the show. Go check it out!
Clap
Love
Cupped
Shaka
Air Quotes
So-So
Horns
Two-Finger Point
Thumbs Up
Dog Puppet
Ballet
Interleaved Thumbs Up
Fingers Crossed
Swoop
Family
Headpinch
Hidden
Secret
Little Bit
Lizardhead
Dance
Folded
Two Finger Guns
Peace
Flight
Live Long & Prosper
Knuckles
Bird Puppet
Crawler
Doghead
Itsy Bitsy
Claws
Interleaved
Two Thumbs Up
Pledge
Interleaved Point
Mockingjay
Rock
Paper
Scissors
Walking Fingers
You
Excellent
Fistbump
Fistpunch
Stop
Thumb Trick
Rabbit
More
Heart
Never Gonna Give You Up
Never Gonna Give You Up triptych • 8″ x 8″ each (x3)
Here’s a triptych of paintings I created based on the theme of the 2018 Works/San José member show: Infinite Memes. When I saw the theme I immediately thought of rickrolling and wanted to create something based on that.
I re-watched the video and couldn’t decide which look I wanted to show, so I picked three. I figured that had the highest likelihood of someone recognizing what they are in case they mostly remember one (for me it’s the black mock turtleneck and tan trenchcoat). These also gave the feel of the little back-and-forth dance he’s doing during the video.
I’ve done a number of paintings from less-than-ideal and low-res photos, and I like the challenge of extracting something painterly and interesting from them. These were screenshots from YouTube. While I wanted to preserve the look of each setting, I chose a limited color palette to unify them. I liked how the dark slate gray looked on it’s own so I left it flat, in contrast to the detail on the rest of the painting.
Never Gonna Give You Up I • 8″ x 8″
Never Gonna Give You Up II • 8″ x 8″
Never Gonna Give You Up III • 8″ x 8″
Self-Portrait with Untapped
Self Portrait with Untapped • 8″ x 8″
I created this sketch for a self-portrait show at the Art NXT Level / 33 Contemporary Gallery space in Chicago. This opportunity popped up in the middle of my 50|50 efforts and I was feeling a bit overloaded with painting – hence the ink.
This is the first time I’ve drawn on mat board, which is usually used for framing. As a drawing surface it’s much “thirstier” than I expected. It absorbs ink pretty quickly and can get saturated easily so it starts degrading the paper itself. The texture also catches the ink in ways that can be unexpected. Tricky!
I started this during Caltrain commutes to the city to force myself to keep it loose and not get too precious about the lines. The art in the bottom is a pointillism rendering of one of my paintings, Untapped (which itself references the Mona Lisa).
50|50 Sneak Peek
Since May I’ve dived headlong into a few projects: showing at ZeroONE (an art fair/street market), prepping for (and now waiting on) the 100 Block mural project, and ramping up for the 10th Annual 50|50 show at Sanchez Art Center. Here’s a few work-in-progress pics of my theme, gestures. 50|50 is a little different as a show because it’s a benefit and is cash-and-carry – which means all works are available for purchase and can be taken home immediately.
There will only be one chance to see them all together: the opening night of August 31st, 2018. The first two hours are a preview fundraiser benefit for Sanchez Art Center (tickets for sale on Eventbrite – they often sell out!) and then it’s open to the public for the rest of the evening. I’ve been posting them in batches of 5 on the various social networks, and will post the full set in early August or so.
Stack of 50 boards
The first 10 paintings
Boondocks Triptych
Boondocks Triptych • 23″ x 13″
While thinking about new art to make for a comic-themed show (“Ripped from the Strips” at Psycho Donuts), I remembered The Boondocks. It ran from 1996-2006, originally on Hitlist.com and The Source before it got picked up by national newspapers in ’99 when I discovered it. It was political enough that some papers would relegate it, Doonesbury-style, to the Opinion page. I enjoyed the comic and most of its animated incarnation. However, the cartoon shifted in tone from the comic quite a bit…enough that creator Aaron McGruder eventually cut ties with it. The opening theme song by Asheru still gets stuck in my head though.
I figured if the comic were going today, Huey and Riley would be Black Panther fans so they’re doing the Wakanda salute here…or trying to. After I inked it I realized I reversed it on Riley, which is incorrect. It kinda makes sense that Huey would get it right and Riley’s being a punk about it, though. Maybe he just wasn’t paying close attention to the form and would get pissed off if you pointed it out. Or it might actually be a partially-completed “up yours” gesture. Either intent works! I couldn’t bring myself to draw Granddad as anything but grumpy; he’s not pleased to be here.
Flaming Carrot
Flaming Carrot • 5.75″ x 5.75″
I think every artist has a go-to character/style/theme when they’re feeling stuck…here’s one of my go-to’s when I want to draw a comic character.
This past weekend was Silicon Valley Comic-Con and we’re less than a month from Free Comic Book Day (first Saturday of May), so in honor of those, Psycho Donuts in Campbell is hosting a “Ripped from the Strips” show. It’s been a little while since I’ve drawn in a comic style, so I decided to go for one of my standbys: Flaming Carrot.
Flaming Carrot is an indie comic character created by Bob Burden in 1979, published in some form up until 2006. He was one of the “Mystery Men“, a superhero group also created by Burden that was made into a movie in 1999 that’s a pretty fair (though much flashier) representation of the oddity of the comics.
I like the combination of things to draw for Flaming Carrot – the giant carrot mask, on fire, on a guy in a kinda rumpled button-down shirt. Superhero costumes are usually spandex or armor so it’s fun to draw something different. I flipped through a pose reference book to find something suitably epic to base his pose on for exclaiming his battle cry, “Ut!” I sketched it in pencil, filled it in with watercolors, and inked the linework once it was dry.
Reject pile for Natural Conclusions
Total paint rejection. On the other hand, acrylic binds pretty well to itself.
When I came up with the idea for Natural Conclusions, I knew it was highly dependent on the kind of artwork I’d find in thrift stores. I had a vague idea that landscapes or still lifes would probably be the easiest subject to find for original paintings. They were…but I also came across a lot of other stuff too. About 15-20% of what I came across ended up working for this particular project. Here are the various reasons why pieces were either non-starters or failed along the way:
Colors too unrealistic. I found a few with background/skies that were so far beyond any natural color (hot pink) that any interpretation I’d make would bear no resemblance to the original. I was a little leery about whether Cherry Blossoms \ Shae and City Sunset / AP would work out for this reason, but the subjects were too interesting to pass up and it worked out.
Lighting too unrealistic. I came across lots of bizarre lighting for moonlit scenes. I decided that it was okay to have an unnaturally large moon (always a full moon…no love for the waxing/waning out there) as long as the scene was even a little realistic. That’s how Winter Forest \ Anonymous and Night Mountains / Brooke P made the cut.
Far too busy. I found some good candidates that I later realized had too much conflicting detail to clearly show what the landscape was. If I found myself thinking about how to simplify it – rather than how to fill in detail – then it was too busy. Since only a slice of the original would be showing it needed to still look like a landscape, and these would just look abstract.
Words. Paintings with words are popular home decoration but didn’t really fit this project. They might make for an interesting Jasper Johns-style collage. I’ve seen some fun uses of frames-with-words, like this awesome one with Skeletor.
Good enough. I really wasn’t sure if I’d find enough to work with, so sometimes I bought paintings that I later decided were pretty reasonable on their own. When I had this change of heart, I donated them back.
Material failures. I had two promising paintings that were either oil or had some kind of coating that eventually rejected the acrylic: one was a Victorian house, and one was a barn in the snow. I had practically finished the Victorian one when I removed the tape, and the layers of acrylic I’d painted lifted right up along with it. When I start each painting I always put a base isolation coat to seal them, and that lifted up too. I checked the barn (which I’d taped off but not started painting) and sure enough, the isolation coat lifted off that one too. Very disappointing.
Huge moon, wiggly plants, what?
Too busy. Branches and boards?
Wordy. Kinda liked the popsicles
On second thought, good enough as is
The barn that wasn’t meant to be