The Surplus of Kurt Angles Situation

As some of you may know, I met Kurt recently.









This was fun. Kurt now owns that little watercolour. I think he wanted to put my name on a gold plaque. He kept reading it out really loudly.





Kurt settled as a logical muse between working in a shop and practising cartoons.

He always has been magic.









This one began as a phone doodle.

Back with Lizards on Japanese paper

UPDATE! John K blogged about me! Argh! No it's good!

He even included some really old obscure drawings and my drawings 'of' his characters which I'd assumed he'd hated. Hoorah! Maybe he does hate them, but there they are nonetheless! Huzzah! Woot! Lol! Nob! (Click on the image below)








Hello! Today some spontaneous Lizards, perhaps for David.













Also now my blogs come with bonus 'Kurt Angles'. It is because I have a surplus.

blog of no consequence: Bob and Kurt

Bob at Christmas as dwarf





Kurtles Angle... going to see him on Saturday.





Wrestling is still fun

Some of these drawings are leftovers and anomalies from earlier eras.





What the heck is this? What possessed me? Sometimes when I try to assimilate cartoon influences things go a bit ungainly. John K just did another post about 'cute' and I think I might be an unmaster of cute, like McKimson. I'm rubbish. Maybe I have a man gene in my drawing lobes. But maybe I haven't tried hard enough for cute, maybe I'm beating about the bush looking for something obscure:









I was never going to post this one because I thought it was stiff and clumsy, then I looked at gaping John up on the rough drawings wall, and he acquired a certain pathos there by himself on the big blue expanse of paper, seemingly gaping in total incomprehension:





These are drawings that I reckon I learn from. Stuff about poise and bodies and thighs and bulges and face lumps, and bulges. Important stuff.

the Era of Too Many Rich Reds

Well since I seem to have quite a lot of pictures to show you, I might do the paintings first, pace myself a bit.

There’s a palette I’ve used for a lot of paintings over the past year or so. I’ve been trying to finish them so I can finish up this era.

‘The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find.’ -
Freda Adler

Lately I’ve been finding these colours problematically bright and sweetie-like. There are too many of them. (Though this also presents an interesting challenge…) In the paintings I’m planning, the colours will be more ‘limited’, one way or another. At least limited enough that I feel in control of the colour and that it doesn’t dominate the other formal aspects of the picture. And so that it doesn’t look horrible and make me want to be sick.

Let’s be thorough about this. Here are the colours I’m lumbered with:


Michael Harding Phthalocyanine Blue and Zinc White





Grumbacher Pre-Tested Oil Quinacridone Red





Grumbacher Pre-Tested Oil Cadmium Barium Yellow Deep





(I think I made the yellow big because yellows are tricky bastards.)

Grumbacher Ultramarine Violet





Old Holland Flesh Ochre





Mussini Burnt Umber



Later, when I came back to the palette and it all seemed a bit too warm and cosy, and I had just bought a MASSIVE tube of raw umber, I added that to the mix too.

It’s the size of the big tube here in front of the little tubes:





Only it’s this colour:





Wikipedia has this useful piece of info about Raw Umber:

Raw Umber is a color that resembles raw umber.

I have a brain that doesn’t like wastage. So when I have a great big tube of a colour, I mind less about using it liberally.

Some of the artist grade oil colours are very expensive, so I become quite… aware…of this when I use them.

The thing is, at the moment I’m veering more toward using acrylic and other waterbased media UNDERNEATH a final layer of oil glazes, rather than using oils alone.

This is because acrylic dries fast and flat, is pleasingly opaque and allows for a more dynamic ‘drawing’ process in which changes and adjustments can be made spontaneously. The combination of acrylic/ the other plethora (plethora!) of media compatible with acrylic/ and finally the richness of oil colour gives quite a lot of scope for intricate other-worldly finishes, and quite a lot of scope for the painting to develop a strong sense of purpose along the way.

So this is Shelby, she’s a lady I painted with just oils, and taking advantage of the blobs and crags that inevitably appear. Using the above palette, I should add. I don’t think she’s finished.





Here’s her face in closeup so you can better see the texture. She’s painted on a ceramic tile:





in contrast, here’s a tiny painting from a while back painted in this palette but with a drawn/ mixed media underpainting and quite a lot more sensitive detail. Of course, it all depends on how much you like sensitive things….





Now a peculiar half-breed… a painting that was getting on quite well being shiny and plasticky, but which has had a decisive opaque oil makeover in recent times. It’s another startled giraffe:









That’s all in the same palette. But I have been subduing it more, painting in flatter swathes with tertiary kind of mixtures, rather than being dictated to by the bossy primaries.






Now… this one’s got really weird. Bob said to me it’s funny that I should turn on a particular picture and call it weird when I’m always painting weird dog explosions and minotaur tantrums. But I’m finding this one tricky. It’s based on some of those old drawings, but it needs to evolve its own authority, it might need a radical change.

I think maybe it’s a transitional type of thing where I’m figuring out HOW I’m going to paint and using wilfully obscure combinations of subject matter and atmosphere.





And Kurt’s developed a bit of a tan.




Here’s another old one in the same palette. This one’s all in oils, but with the texture worked up to a fair old level of detail and teeny tiny brushstrokes and flourishes. There are lots of ways I like to paint, but I think this isn’t quite the way that’s right for Right Now.






I have more painted stuff to show, but I will save it for an imminent follow-up, since it’s all in different colours and generally it’s got a lot more to do with bats. Then there will be some drawings too.

Pink Sugary Inky Mouth Holes

I think I’ll sandwich some dodgy digiphotos of unfinished paintings between some nice new drawings. So here we go.

Here are some attempts at self-portraiture, done in pencil and I am occasionally getting impatient with pencils. But I still feel that I need to satisfy my meticulous urges and I learn from being all pernickety about the pencil drawings.

I was trying to illustrate the lopsidedness of my face. The right side of my face has shrivelled bones. Instead of a jaw joint it has a piece of my rib. It’s a long story.







Now here are some of the paintings in which I have used the ‘X Factor’ palette that I mentioned last time in the comments.

The thing is my digital camera is very cheap and the colours come out crude.





It’s hard to tell from that, but I have worked on this one. Oil paintings like this tend to go through distinct phases. There’s a phase when they’re new and fresh and they look all flushed with the glow of youth and potential and many an art teacher would shout ‘leave it alone’.


But I’m interested in potential so much as I am in trying to make perfect paintings. So often I want a more dense and finished finish, though not necessarily a smooth and polished one, so there are always tensions to resolve. But between the flush of youth stage and the point of ‘perfect finish’ there tends to be an awkward adolescent stage where it’s neither finished nor fresh and just looks a bit ungainly. That’s the stage Kurt’s neckhead’s at, not that you’d be able to tell from that picture.

It takes some concentration to keep the thing alive even with skin-disease-like levels of detail.

Click on the next little square to see Shelby, the unfinished internet pinup lady. She is holding her breasts.





Here’s some kind of sentimental angel:





This next (older) one might be my favourite of my uses of that palette. It’s different though, it’s oil glazes over layers of other media, in miniature:





Now here’s a fairly unedifying sketchbook page in which you can see my brain at work, also I was thinking through next oil palette options.

(You have to click on the tiny square to see the whole thing)







Now how could I let an entry pass without some great big sweaty wrestler faces.

This time Randy became an eggtomato, and as for Kurt, I think that because I felt so guilty for making him into Slimer I went overboard and made the most megacutesy sugar overload babyfaced kurts in the universe.

It did make me want to draw more in pink ink though. Like splatter it all over the place.





The pink Kurt looks like a fountain, he looks like water ought to start spurting out of his mouth hole.

Next time I might have begun to tackle my epicness epic painting desires. It’s time for something more like a summer blockbuster.