It Doesn't Mean I'm Sorry, Toow Eyez, and Butterfly Descending on Flowers

I became a fan of Jean-Michel Basquiat. I admire the way he layered his artwork. Paintings on top of paintings. Watching how thin washes wash over thick... how layers may or may not be directly related to the final product... he had a sort of intellectual freedom and skill which really impressed me.

I've been experimenting a lot with the cheap colours at Dollarama. They sell cheap canvases at $3/each and cheap paint sets in water colour, gouache, and acrylic. What can I do with that crap? Well... have a lot of fun without breaking the bank. Of the three, this is my favourite: there is ink, water colour mixed with acrylic colour, light on dark, weak washes on strong paint, strong paint on weak washes... this experimentation is quite fun. 

This is almost all acrylic. The flowers with the colour in the middle have ink jet magenta that comes in a bottle.

Iza Portrait

"Iza Portrait" is based on a sketch that I did about a month or so ago, and posted a few weeks ago. This is in the rough stage. It was done at MAB Ventures, which is a small studio outfit located in North Vancouver. I will finish it next Sunday by necessity, since it will be my last class there.

Iza Portrait

The painting is actually on real canvas this time with acrylic paint. 

And of course, here is the sketch that goes with the painting.

Iza Portrait Sketch

Fishlegs Portrait

Fishlegs Portrait

So this painting I did today.  I wanted to write some Chinese words. Something I learned about doing that today... the word 'fish, fish, fish,' repeated over-and-over with different sized brushes, taught me something about Chinese words: that is, there are so many ways to do the same thing. It may consist of many small pieces, the bottom part that looks like a box divided into four can be done as a circle with a cross, or it can be a box. The line that starts at the top and has the right angle can jump onto the box, or even plunge all the way to the bottom line, negating the need for the brush to leave. 

It makes me wonder about other Chinese characters, and their pliability with doing it in a hundred different ways to get different effects and such. It's quite an interesting first experiment I plan on playing with more.

Sunflower Field

Update:

I did some more work on this painting, working on the foreground. This is where I'm at now:

February 17, 2013 update

Sunflower Field background

This is the background of the painting, which I did last Saturday at the studio in North Vancouver. I was doing this from memory. When I was working on it, I was thinking that I had to make the flowers point in random directions. But, after looking at a photo of a field of sunflowers, I discovered that they in fact always point in the direction of the sun. Not only that, but the red dots which make up the center portion of the flower head.

I'm making this one for Juni's Valentine's gift. So I guess it will be kind of square, boring, and plain, to suit her tastes. :)

Mountain Flower and Girl

So, this painting was completed February 17, 2013.

Mountain Flower and Girl

 It has already been sold for $125 to the owner of the MAB studio. That's pretty cool... it ends up paying for my classes, which is nice. I decided to simplify the painting. I stole some ideas from other similar sketches to help me with the hands and I changed the central eye into a nose, which is from a different sketch. Anyways, so this is a painting with parts from many different paintings. It was kind of fun to do, but more than anything I'm glad it's got a home.
 
This is the sketch upon which the painting is based:

Sketch

And then this is the painting. Looking at the sketch now, I can see I probably should have brought it in when I started painting it. I did most of it at the art studio in North Vancouver. When I brought the canvas board, I had thought it was blank, but I had already started to paint this and had forgotten about it. Some of the symmetry I like a lot better in this sketch than I do in the painting.
Oddly enough, the painting seems more like this sketch:

But, in many ways, I like the symmetry of this one better. In any case, below is the painting in its current stage of progress.

Girl in Mountains with Flower

Still Life

This painting came from a sketch. That seems to be my modi operandorum.

The sketch is an attempt to meld the still life (bowl of fruit) with the portrait.

Portrait of a Sleeping Girl

I really have to work on the colours in here. I also don't like the 'legs.' But these can both be worked on at a later date when I have some better ideas. I really like the melons, however.

Still Portrait

"There is too much pink," my wife says. I have to agree. Most of the pink on the floor was done to help me with my perspective. A few things I've done here I like: making the lighter or fleshy part of the melons first before going in with the texture which I got from the bra that the model was wearing. I will post updates as the painting evolves.

Orca Border

These images were made as I was trying to create a page border for my upcoming book Salmone Frushdie and the Fisherman's Hook.

Orca Border

 High details to do a border like that were not of great importance. The border above this text is actually pretty good. If you scroll down to see the painting from which it was made, you can see it is not of great quality.

I think the purpose of this quick exercise with an end in mind worked out pretty well. For the books that I have worked on over the last four years or so I have mostly depended on other artists to create the images. Now I'm working on at least doing some of the work myself for the finished product. I don't know think of myself as being good enough for real illustrations, but one must start somewhere.

Orca, Octopus, Fishing Boat, and Salmon

Red's Fishing Boat

Orca

As I mentioned, this is the painting that ended up making the decoration for a page in my book.

Fish Hook