NEW WEBSITE

This is a post to inform all of y'all that my website is back up, only the name now is chloepaintings.net, you see.

I am going to put some of the drawings I've done over the past year up for sale soon, so watch this space. A massive promotional price drop type thing on older work is also on the cards. And I'll be updating it with new work and a new frontpage and stuff very soon.

Wouldn't it be nice if you possessed a piece of my kinetic pencil thought? It would be nice for me if you did, I can tell ya.

Here are some of the nice thumbnails as they appear in the quaint little site wot's called Chloepaintings.net (remember this)... click little squares to see big things. Don't take too much notice if it says 'not for sale' this may very well change soon.

Escher Cheekbones and Heinous Seepage

I’ve kind of finished the infernal dragon. That’s that out the way.

(Click on any of today’s image for a larger version on Flickr. And you could even leave a comment there if you like. But if push comes to shove, I prefer comments here on blogger.)





In the last stages of this mixed media monstrosity, I used a lot of white lines with a thin brush and this stuff called liquid paper. I wrote a little note that said ‘white lines connected to my mind’. I could feel this an exciting little development that I will carry forward to the pictures wot I care about that have both grappling and nature in them.

I don’t normally do this, but here’s the photoshop mock-up that I used as the basis for the dragon painting, and liberties have been taken with perspective and picture fragments. It’s not much of thing in itself, but it kind of signals a little bit where I want to go with my next paintings, a more playful and hands-on approach to pictorial space.







I had been neglecting my other duties to do that. My last week’s wrestler mushes were sitting there begging to be more understood and stuff. Begging to be taken to the extremes of draftswomanship!





Biro frenzy! Unfortunately it seems that biro tends to seep through even the most opaque applications of acrylic paint. Bum bums! Does anyone know of some kind of biro-esque wonderpen that would refrain from such heinous seepage?





Now in the more recent two bottom drawings above, I used some of the information from the biro frenzy ones but tried to filter a bit of likeness back in. Particularly in Randy’s face I began to think about Escher, about getting some optical mischief in there with the wonky cheekbone adventures. I’ve seen some technically spectacular caricatures that are immaculately constructed, and look like Spitting Image puppets, but part of me thinks… why do it like that, when drawing on a 2D plane gives you so much more freedom, freedom to indulge in a play between illusionism and pure linear kicks. I think the bottom two would almost be more suited to being cleaned up like proper cartoon characters and have the shading and the scribbling beaten out of them. Also I would add that I was trying to make Randy a little bit more smug and bastardy, like he is, and that Kurt has got a bit crude and ugly here. He has features that lend themselves to just getting massive. So I still have work to do.

My latest grey blog is entitled birds do not require punk spirit to experience the urgency of life
, you could read it if you want to boogie some more with my thoughts.

I Have Gone Off My Rocker: Boy Fun

Soon I have an assignment to do a cover for an ‘older children’s fantasy book’. At least one. It’s not an actual commission so I’m not being paid. Don’t be silly! Of course not. It’s to prove to unimaginative book publisher types that I can do this sort of thing. The people who represent me in the commercial world have suggested that I do this thing.

On of the comments I had on one of the previous posts made me think that I want to find fun ways of drawing Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys again.






I used to set myself the challenge of drawing the cover of the album in the time it took to burn a CD.






I’ve got this nutty idea in my head about doing deranged pop culture pictures then making them sparkle and twitch and flogging them to the youth on MySpace.

I probably don’t have the technical skills to follow this through… but it’s an intriguing exercise is purposefulness.

In that vein, I’ve been making studies and doing little thumbnails of Randy and John the heart throb wrestlers, which has taken me to some cutely homoerotic visual places. Slightly unnerving places. This stuff was all knocked up in the past couple of days. It all qualifies as ‘provisional’ and ‘sketches’ and I’m not sure exactly where I’m headed.







All of this is sort of an exercise in trying to follow through the energy and spontaneous fluidity of my biro sketches to something on a slightly more substantial scale.










I’ve been inspired by Katie Rice and the cute energy of her girls and got this crazy idea in my mind that I want to do something deranged, energetic and cute with lumpy yet charismatic gym rat boys. But it’s quite a task.

And I haven’t got a clue if I’m cut out for cartoons exactly… it’s all a work in progress.

I think one of my fake book covers will be a Harry Potter one since I’m cocky enough to think I could do it justice. Hmmm… trying to kill two birds with one stone… is there any way I could subtly cast Brian Wilson as Ron Weasley?

Oh and if anyone in the world owns the game Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and has screenshots of minotaurs they wouldn’t mind emailing to me, I would be jolly grateful. I plan some more ‘damn celestial’ minotaurs (thanks to the clown ninja for that comment, I appreciate the comments) and I’m going to have to get myself back into a more generally celestial mindspace for my book cover project and temporarily put aside the deranged biro scribbled WWE men.

Usually when I’ve depicted women, they’ve ended up kind of wispy and dreamy like this Shirley Temple.