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.
