Who is this handsome devil?

Would you believe it's me? The "handsome" part probably threw you off. I forgive you. Sarcasm on the internet requires italics.

Granted, it also doesn't look that much like me yet. It's step one, so you take what you can get. Click on the "painting" label for this post to see how other paintings evolved from odd sketches. I might look like me yet! Stranger things have happened!

Then again, this canvass is cursed. So far it's been the place of an aborted Marilee painting and a failed Millie painting. (My eyes are, appropriately, resting on Millie's breasts.) Maybe third time's a charm? Eh, at this point I'll take what I can get. Besides, the only person I offend with failure this time is myself.

This is going to be a challenge. Not only will failure offend me, but I'm trying to paint a dude in a series that features only chicks. (Yeah, I'm putting myself on the "On Beauty" category. Fuck you for rolling your eyes!) There's a reason I only paint chicks. Not only are their infinitely hotter than dudes, but their delicate features are far easier to handle in my style. Think about the sexy standards for men: Words like "rugged" and "stubble" pop up. How the fuck can I do that in my deliberately flat and simplified style? Fortunately, my long, luxurious hippie hair gives me something fun with which to work. I CAN BE BISHONEN! I'm not sure it's a good thing, but it fits the series, I guess.

More nightmare fuel: The sketch layered over the original photo, to show I'm not *that* far off in the details department. ENJOY YOUR SLEEP TONIGHT!



Edit: This picture makes me look like a total butterface. That is so not cool!

The last chance for progress

My coffee house fantasy girl painting is now complete. I no longer have any excuse for not working on my comic. Fuck.

"Finishing" the latest paintings

The goal today was to get the paintings done. Goals are supposed to be met. Well, fuck that.



I got one completed! The current title for this is "The War Wife" - meant to evoke the Asian bride some soldiers bring home. Yeah, I'm still clinging onto the theme of temptations through time.



Despite encouragement from others, I am not satisfied with how this one is going yet. The theme was sort of the "edgy" chick you spot across the coffee house and can't help but fantasize about. Is she entirely self-centered and tragically hipster, or is wonderfully wild and exuberant?

The question now is...where to go with it? I am totally lost with the idea of a background. Maybe if I look at it fresh tomorrow something will click on in my brain. Who knows.

The power of hot chicks

How lazy am I? To draw the next comic, I have to trace some stuff on the light table. As today's goal was to catch up on TV I missed and netflix, the light table would have taken me out of viewing range. Result: Fuck the comic!

HOWEVER, the thing I do best when going though TV I don't care that much about is painting. If you are a good reader of this blog and not just someone checking it only before seeing me so you can make me feel appreciated, you'll remember I mentioned two paintings I started in DC that sucked. (Not that blog-cramming is a bad thing. I'll take a token effort over no effort any day.) Tonight, the goal was to fix those ugly things!



The original paint sketch was of a angry girl with her arms crossed. She was loosely based on my image of one of my characters, Meret, who is half-Asian. As that sketch was a proportional nightmare, I decided I needed a model. After a Google search for Ziyi Zhang, I was set!

So far, this painting is looking rather nice. It doesn't come across due to crappy photography, but I'll still take the time to say I love her lips. I got the sexy puffiness while still using expressive strokes - as opposed to my normal fallback of forced black outlines. Go me! Now the bad news: The heck will I do for a background? As of now I'm thinking a very gentle pale blue to keep the high contrast look I've got so for. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate them.



The original painting sketch for this one wasn't that bad, really. It was just boring. This began as a wide-eyed gal in a hood looking all fantasy mysterious. At first, I tried to give it a push to see if it could be turned into something decent, but I managed to wreck it completely about five paint strokes. Oh well. I flipped the canvas over and went back to find a babe for inspiration. (You can still see some now-inverted parts of the first sketch behind the current.) Since I'm still on the Neko Case kick, she seemed a fitting target. The only big Neko image I liked enough to save was one of her in braids. There we go. Still, aside from the pose and hair, the features came more from the Top Model I was watching on DVR than Neko.

Hey, it's progress of some sort. Whether these paintings ever get *finished* is another thing...

It's like an unfinished symphony...

...but instead of brilliance I have infused my work with halfassitute.



"Scandal" is diamond in this rough. I consider it one of the best paintings I've done. The colors are great, the composition is almost there (like everything in this post, it's only finished enough to pass the Mill admissions test) and the face is exactly what I wanted. Yay me!



Hey, remember the Queen of Clubs? (Scroll down a couple posts if you don't.) Well, fuck her. I tried and I tried to make her work, but instead of playing card wardrobe I ended up with pure Chrispy doodling. You know what? The doodling was *way* better than that awkward face. Out goes the temptress and in come the mecha-swirls! (Bad name for a band: The Mecha Swirls.) You know, if you didn't know the failure that preceded it, this would be a decently snazzy abstract work. But I reminded you. And told you scroll down and see the initial abomination. You know its shameful past. Fuck.

The tile is now "All Roads Lead to Rome" - chosen in hopes it could ascribe some meaning to a viewer. Deep, I know.



Expecting "Risk Key" - my 70's temptress? SO WAS I! What happened was a pitfall all artists know too well: The sketch was too good. I got just what I wanted in my blue boozer, so adding anything just make it look worse. With no idea where to go, I bailed after marring it only slightly. It's no where near refined enough to ever pass for finished, but it will take a major effort to work it out and keep the vibe. Fear of failure level at maximum!

So now I was down two temptresses. It was time to make more! At midnight! With the application due the next day! After starting on a Generic Medieval Babe, I was not thrilled; it seemed far too bland and felt like a unicorn - surrounded by fairies - was going to gallop into frame any minute. In other words, it resembled my target idea so much that any satire I wanted became sincerity. Onto the junk heap it went.

Its replacement... has the same problem. This piece - "Who Knows You Best?" - is also meant to capture a romanticized image. This time it's the poor servant girl. She's always there to tend to your needs. She doesn't have expensive clothing or accessories, so she makes due with what she has. Her face is round and sweet. Her eyes are sincere. She doesn't have the ruby lips of a starlet, but does it even matter? She stands by obediently, waiting to attend to your wishes. (Any wish? Hmmm...)

But is it too sincere? The static post was meant to evoke the stiff stance of servant waiting for action, but it makes for a non-dynamic composition. The flat expression is meant to show dutiful kindness without love. The view of her entering from the curtains is meant to evoke both a breech of privacy and an intimate knowledge of the charge's needs. It's a reverse Stockholm Syndrome: Her job is to be the perfect woman for you; how can one not entertain the thought? It's a nice sentiment, but is it art?

Granted, the work is obviously unfinished. There simply wasn't time to add depth to the colors and tweak the face to my liking. It reached a point where, instead of adding more paint to the palette, I just added water and smeared color around until it (mostly) filled the lines.

It should also be noted that this work, like the rest of my temptresses,was brought about by a great film. This time it was Far From Heaven, a movie that mimics the classic Douglas Sirk films in style. If you haven't seen a Sirk film - and I haven't - the style is of a wholesome 50's environment with several complex underlying issues. Visually, all colors in the film are oversaturated and bright. Suddenly the painting makes a lot more sense, eh?



Out of time and with "Risk Key" out of the picture, I was one painting shy and had to do something quick. With The Fountain - my go-to movie for painterly inspiration - I attacked Generic Medieval Babe and drowned her in broad strokes of green. The inspiration for this painting came from the "Suburban Sprawl" sketch a few posts down. Once it became clear that I can't work a paintbrush enough to do detail work, the initial drawing was toss out and pure Chrispy doodling took over. Once again, The Fountain turned my work into something about nature and plants. (It's that whole Tree of Life thing.) What is nature's version of suburban sprawl? I went with the old growth forest tapering off to fresher, greener thickets. And so "Old Growth" was the last-minute addition to my parade of failure. Yes, it is also noticeably unfinished. Whee!



Notice how I kept saying I needed one more painting? Actually, I needed two - but I quickly realized that was just not going to happen, so I went with my one remaining hot chick painting not on display anywhere. Oh, Cheerleader 3, your love of Swedish football pads my roster.

Second verse; not as good as the first

While waiting for the gesso on Dana's box to dry, I still had the itch to do some painting. Some interesting stuff happened, but the lack of Cate Blanchett soon took its toll.

It's become clear now that the theme of the latest "On Beauty" additions is temptation. The first painting (in the preceding post) is meant to evoke the starlet scandal of early Hollywood. She's the woman that *almost* makes it worth screwing up your life. Disaster surrounds her, but that only manages to make her more seductive.



This next painting is given away by it's (working) title: Risk Key. This time, the temptation comes in the form of the storied key parties of the 70's. You have to ask yourself: Can I be a swinger?

Since each of the paintings so far have been created while watching a film, it would make sense that this was painted while viewing "The Ice Storm." Yeah, I was watching "The Last King of Scotland." It didn't hold my interest, clearly, so the painting just went where it wanted to go. I had very little control over it.

While the result is interesting both visually and conceptually, it was frustrating to get this framework down. I always start my paintings with a brown or maroon "sketch" - NEVER blue. I chose blue with the idea of painting an Ugandan beauty - eh, it made sense at the time - but this annoying Scotsman kept getting in the way. Blue is a bad sketch color because alone it's too bold and when watered down it doesn't thin as nicely as I'd like. I had to squirt in some precious white paint (I consume white paint as if it were candy) to get proper tonal changes.



This next painting is where things really went off the rails. The movie this time was "The Darjeeling Limited." Wes Anderson has so much style in his films that it almost overpowers mine! It's only fitting that the woman created here is subjected to an ornamental and cumbersome outfit.

The face was a disaster from the start. After getting the first painting sketch to a stopping point, I still had paint. Well, heck, why not start another. During "The Last King of Scotland." A movie that only inspired by losing my attention and causing my mind to wander. Brilliant. (It's not a bad film, honestly. It just had the unfortunate timing of being seen between films that were either wonderfully done or stylistically intriguing.) The painting didn't start to find its form until "Darjeeling" was started.

The goal was actually to work with another stylish film: Juliet of the Spirits. Problem is, I can't paint a woman with the round, sweet face of Juliet. If the face looks out of place, that's because I gave up and went with what I know. The rest of the painting will have to be nudged along until it all fits together.

What is the temptation here? I suppose the ornate settings of Wes Anderson lore made me think of the ornate trappings that constrained women of the, uh. Fuck, what crazy British era *is* that? ANYWAY, once I settled on that I mythologized further and turned the woman into a playing card. I'm thinking by the end, she'll be the "Queen of Clubs" - a name that certainly implies some dangerous temptation, no?

The poorly rendered praying hands were meant to give the idea of the unobtainable temptation. Not only does one have to go through several layers of clothing to get at her, but she's also the good girl who would never let herself indulge in bodice-ripping fantasies. The seemingly unobtainable always has a way of seducing.

I'm not sure what direction my queen will follow as I try to improve/fix that beginning, but it should be interesting.

The question now is... what's next in my slide show of harlots through the ages?

The time has come to paint some chicks

Among my many thousands of deadlines in the next two weeks is one for submissions to the Art at the Mill show. It's a no-cred, small venue local art show that raises fun for a historic mill. Most of the art displayed there is painfully conservative and traditional. (To paraphrase someone... It's a show where many of the paintings are of the mill itself.) Rural landscapes, wild horses, bridges, flowers... all of those are typical mill works. Buuuut, they also let real artists participate! If they think it will sell, they will accept it. It helps the resume and can potentially result in quick cash for an artist.

If I was the uppity sort, I'd reject the whole thing as too commercial. But, uh, I am ALL FOR being commercial! Well, actually, I want to find that spot where I can do what I please and still make money. The task is to work in several forms of art, but keep my recognizable style. By having so many comfort zones, I can choose the type of art I produce to fit the venue.

The mill show is a challenge for me: How can I make my style of work desirable to a crowd that is happy to buy paintings of barns? My first attempt was a complete disaster. I send off photos of my best work... and got one pity acceptance. The piece (Floodgates) was placed among nature paintings and looked revoltingly out of place. It didn't sell. So I changed things for the next show. This time I was going to paint nature scenes - but in MY style! The result was The Hiking Trip.

I had three paintings finished when it was time to submit, so I tossed in two others (five can be submitted, if you suck at math) from my On Beauty series Both beauties got accepted. One hiking painting (which my graduate class hated because it was "too commercial") was also accepted. The rest were put on reserve, to be hung when other paintings sold. For the artist's reception, all five of my paintings were on display. Which meant they had not sold. Shit!

When I went to pick up my work, I did get some good news. Some couple, having gotten the week of the show wrong, had arrived on the last day art could be picked up. They were allowed to look around and, lo and behold, they had chose to purchase one of my paintings! (BEST OF THE REST, BABY!) Oh course, it was the one painting I thought had no chance of selling: Eye Candy 1!

So my one success came from my stable of beautiful women. FINE, I'LL DO THAT! The first week of August will be devoted to some last-minute heroics to create some new chicks for show. (Yes, Dana, this means I'm putting your box first! It'll be ready!)

While the plan wasn't to start any painting yet, I've had such an inspiring summer I was not going to let inspiration pass me by. Last night I was watching the movie Notes on a Scandal, and something about it made me get out the paint. The result: A sinister and seductive women with the face of Cate Blanchett.

The painting is still in "sketch" stage, but I'm reasonably pleased with the progress so far. There's no telling how the final will end up looking, but it's a nice start. I'm just happy to see I can still paint!