Little Paintings

Today, some small paintings done for a life drawing last semester. I was happy with the way the turned out, especially the laundry one. Laundry is done in coloured inks and watercolours on illustration board. The second is in oils on illustration board. The creepy drawing manikin is oils on Masonite.

Experimental Grounds

Works from last year again today. Some little paintings with different textured grounds. The first one is an owl in acrylics on gesso mixed with flour to thicken it (on a Masonite board). The second one is in memory of my Chinchilla, Loki. It's acrylics on a ground of wood shavings mixed with gesso and glue on a Masonite board. His whiskers are pine needles. The two different pictures show the texture. The last is my Zodiac sign, Capricorn in acrylics on a 3D ground of sculpted Supersculpy. The background it also Supersculpy and the whole thing is glued to a Masonite board.

The Toastosaurus

This was done for a project last year where we had to paint on a found object ground. I had a toaster that didn't work very well and it always burnt the toast. So, I threw in its last two pieces of bread and then it went extinct. Toastosaurus is a herbivore and has two rows of toasted enriched white bread slices on his back for protection from preditory appliances like the stove.

New Painting!

I just finished this one last night. It has some neat glazing effects that didn't really show up on the picture but my camera needs to be charged before I can try for a better one. It's oil on newspaper/water cooler instructions (glossy) on Masonite. I'm happy with it and I did some adjustments in Photoshop to make it my new desktop. Special thanks to Steve for helping me work out a compositional problem that was bugging me. These are Luna moths. They are native to North America and rather fascinating. I chose them as subject matter for there interesting colour and shape. This was just a personal project I've been doing over Christmas break.

Oil Paintings

Today, two oil painting I did at the start of summer last year. The first is was for my mom who wanted Raphael's little angels from his Sistine Madonna for her redecorated bathroom. Rather than just copy them exactly I've added my own twist. I was pretty happy with the results.

The second was for an alumni gallery show for my high school's 50's anniversary. I was invited to participate and I wanted to do something new for it. I based this off another watercolour I'd done earlier for Media class. Unfortunately, this was right at the end of the year and I didn't have as much time as I wanted for it. I was OK with the results but feel I could have been better.

Scratch boards are fun!

Ah back to school and work is upon us. It's a new year, I'm another year older and still posting some older work. New stuff will be coming with the new semester but I want to finish getting some old stuff posted first. Today: scratch boards. I made all of these myself using melted wax and then dusting on a layer of flour and then covering with ink using a brush. I enjoyed making my own scratch boards and found that thicker wax give me the result I want better than store bought scratch boards do. The coloured one of my shoe is white board with pencil crayon coloured on then acrylic coloured ink on top. The Beluga is reversed: black ground, with black wax and then white gesso on top. The third one, featuring Mulder and Scully is on a textured ground. I did all of these in Media Studies last year and found it to be one of the most enjoyable projects. Unfortunatly, these arn't the best scans. Because of the wax, homemade scratch boards can melt when scanned so they have be lifted above the surface of the scanner. Still you get a pretty good idea of what they look like from these.