Auto en Plastique

20" x 26", watercolour on Yupo, 2009

Ever since I started painting, I looked at my watercolour palette and was fascinated by the strange and interesting ways the colours would dry on its plastic surface. Some time later, I saw a display for Yupo synthetic "paper" in an art store that someone had painted on with some watercolours --not an image, really, but abstract colour mixing which looked a lot like my palette. Interest piqued, I bought a few sheets and tried one out immediately.

The results were interesting but, as I expected, there was a bit of a struggle getting the paint to do what I wanted --or at least what I was used to with regular watercolour paper. The biggest difference is that regular watercolour paper is absorbent and Yupo is not, so I had to come up with a new way of painting. The results are strange and fantastic, yet still watercolour-y, and I love how my brushes glide over the smooth surface like skates on ice so, a few years after my first attempt, I recently went back into the studio with some aching-to-be-used photo ref and resumed experimentation with the Yupo.

I knew it would be hard to control, so I accepted the chaos and had fun. After a few paintings, I was really starting to loosen up (something this paper encourages, if not enforces) and this car painting set the standard of how I like and need to paint on this surface.

Comments

Axel Foley's Chevy Nova (1/25 scale model)

Multiple tributes, here. I remember first seeing Beverly Hills Cop on video at my friend Chris K's house, 'cause his family had a VCR and we'd watch tons of movies (and record music videos) together. The summer of 1984 was a special time for us (having created a strong bond in school since Grade 6 a few years before), going on biking adventures around the 'burbs and into the city, etc., and home video played an important role from then until I moved to the opposite end of Scarborough just before we started high school. We liked the movie a lot, both of us fans of Eddie Murphy from his Saturday Night Live days. I don't think I'd seen the movie since then (it would have been 1985, probably summer, since the movie came out in late 1984) and I became curious to see if it still held up. It did. It does. I found Murphy as charming as ever and the comedy (and even the action) holds up very well and its very re-watchable and very entertaining. Beverly Hi

City of Angels

17" x 11", watercolour and digital, 1999 Ah, City of Angels . I thought I was getting cool film noir but got a cheesy musical instead (Google it if you must). Still, it was fun to make the poster and associated images, mostly because the research consisted of watching real films noir and buying a great book on movie posters of the genre. I made tons of sketches and a few digital mock-ups. For the final poster above, I made three separate watercolour paintings (one of the couple and one each of the two black and white heads) and composited them in Photoshop, where I also added the text. In true movie poster fashion, I wanted the actors names to be the top two names, but I lost that battle and had to use the characters' names instead. It looks fine, but it implies that "Kingsley and Stone" are the lead actors in the show. Oh, well...it's only community theatre... By making the "angel" above half black and white and half colour, th

Small Pond Arts Puppet Wagon (1/24 scale model)

I dreamed up the Small Pond Shipyard for my fanciful scratch-built sci-fi airship creations (which still only exist in sketch/Photoshop mock-up form (and boxes in my closet) for now), but more and more ideas kept coming ( this wind turbine , for example, will be part of a rather elaborate diorama I'll be working on this winter). But the Puppet Wagon was a sleeper surprise, to be sure. [Really, though, I don't know why I was so eager to build this right away since I was planning to slowly develop my modelling skills with simpler builds first and the work my way up to more complicated projects.] Not all parts were used/needed. Most of these ideas have come from watching modelling videos online, and when I saw a review of this sweet little Japanese "Ramen Shop" food truck by Aoshima (right-side drive!), my brain started making jokes about customizing it to the weird food truck ideas I'd been posting on Facebook. But the more I thought about what the co

The Naked Silo

Search This Blog