Digital Silliness

I got a wacom tablet for my birthday.

i will do well serious professional things with it next. First I done these.

Mummybabies 3

Further Mummybabies

Birth, Gosh

Initial plan for a painting that ended up quite different:

Knightmare with a Red Pencil

Knightmare, the British children's role-playing dungeon-based game show that ran from 1987-1994, is one of the more nerdy things that I'm a fan of.



I had a notion that I wanted to do a series of works based on Knightmare, eventually some quite moody watercolours. I don't know if they'd be fan art as such. They sort of are in spirit but it's obscure enough for me to not expect most people to get the references. I just hope to be able to use some of the atmosphere, awkwardness and creepiness to make some nice pictures that have a coherence together. I need to do something technicolour, and something with consistence. I may also attempt some landscapes with similar atmosphere.

Also lately I've gone a bit mental with red col-erase pencils and animation paper.
















little self-portrait next






Notions for future blogs that would scratch itches:

Some topless boymen (I've missed them)
boybands
JLS
Boys of Twilight with their drawn on abs
early Take That
smalltime cage fighters

Drawings of Queen (I'm rather familiar with their shapes from formative years, and I would love to get my hands on Freddie's teeth)

Birds of New Zealand in technicolour

All these things somehow combined in technicolour

organic hip potato Chloe

A bit more like it... I kind of relaxed with Chloe and improvised jazzwise with her. It is good to be organic with things.





The photos these were from were in full sunlight, which makes for squinting and strong dark shadows, obviously.

Self

Visions of Chloe...






Scooting back and forth between some degree of realism and whatever the opposite is... then pulling back to some comfortable place in the middle... but where's the golden zone of creative fecundity?









Oh dear.

Sisters

Sidmouth Folk Festival: Craft Fair

I drew my sister Hannie ramshackle style while we were sitting behind the stall serving customers. She leaned over me and corrected the jaw line to the one she wanted.





I got a new 'calligraphy' pen. I'd like to make better use of it soon.





Here's a baldy bonus: Self portrait as troll from weird Paul McCartney obsessed college days.

Odds, sods, heads, ambivalence

This is me good self with me big tall bulb forehead and weak chin.









Spare mood kitties.





Here is an astronaut. I was going to do astronauts then I got an ambivalence attack.

Moo. Mooooooo!

It's all about the cowfolk. One has to think of the cattlekind when planning minotaurs.

Actually this is me saying 'moo'. And a man cow facing the other way.









My face has some peculiar angles from underneath.









This messy minotaur has borrowed Ric Flair's trunks. He is wrestling with a flower.









My thought process seems to involve a whole lotta scribblin' these days.





Self with unsettlingly large infant forehead and crazy person eyes (plus gentle innocent cattle person):




These two cows live two gardens away from our house. They are my neighbours. They know me and Bob. They can see me when I'm in the bathroom brushing my teeth. they say 'moo!' at me. The black and white one seems kind of agitated lately. The brown one has a deeper more melifluous moo. But she is a lady not a man cow.

Bat Flash Jesus Ghosts

Well, I said summer blockbuster. Sometimes I think I promise too much, just for the sake of suspense. Do I think I’m Hitchcock? What a fool am I.

I went back to a big old painting.

The painting originally was going to have Janus and Paul Gascgoine (ex England football player famous for crying at the 1990 world cup) and a barn owl and Shirley Temple and Jesus and Andre the Giant. It was quite a scene. I thought I’d sort it out compositionally with my immense virtuosity. I was thinking wishfully.

I’ve done some fresh little studies in order to commit myself to this gazza janus temple project.

Here’s a little pink ink one. It’s alright but the subject is too weird for such lightness of touch, or that’s what I thought when I was looking at it. I want to experiment with layering stuff over the pink. When I planned these dense weird subjects, I always meant for some of the ‘resolution’ to come through the process of painting itself, as pretentious as that might sound.






Here’s the whole monstrous thing as it stands now. I think it’s salvageable. I’m getting good and impatient with it, like Delacroix.




The next one is a more involved study that will become something more like a painting in its own right. Quite drawing-heavy, and incorporating Randy biting Kurt’s arm but simultaneously possessed by an Orc.

Here’s a detail from the big one, a bad photo taken with flash. I put it in because I saw a little face in the bumps on the reflection then drew the little face on photoshop. It makes me remember how excited I can get about the potential of oil painting. I could illusion myself up some shine and have a whole alternative layer of shine universe on the surface, if I was committed to the idea.

Next here’s Randy and John with a friendly bat. This is unfinished of course. I’m trying to grow the fun of my wrestling drawings and not suppress these urges but make them beautiful.





Funnily enough I sent John Cena a myspace message today. He seems a good sort, but I hope he’s not upset by my depictions of him. They don’t tend to be especially pretty.

Next here’s a fragment of yet another version of the Janus monster painting, but bigger and rougher. One of the faces of the two faced god is Shirley Temple. Some of the scribbling and lumpyness felt meaningful at the time.




Lastly here’s some minor self portraiture, in which my eyebrows go on their own merry way. I was hoping to come up with something cute enough for a new avatar, but I’m not sure.




I want to get back into drawing with my isograph pens. But they are a real hassle. I realised today that I wasn’t the only one who experiences this because I read an interview with R Crumb in which he talked about his rapidograph pens (nearly the same thing) and how you have to endlessly coax them and shake them and take them apart and get ink all over yourself and wash them and stroke them and sing to them in lilting tones. But they do make a darned nice line, they handle in a way I like. As much as I love biros, bless their 27 pence socks.

I’m thinking a lot about Hogarth and Gillray and Cruikshank and the history of funny English draftsmanship.

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.