Artificial Heart

22" x 15", watercolour, 2016

I mention in this post the inspiration certain key artists that got me fired up about painting in general, and watercolours, specifically, but here I am, nearly 30 years later, starting to really learn from them.
The mood and the trees are heavily influenced by Jon J Muth's work in his Dracula graphic novel; it's my own scene, but I wanted to see if I could evoke even a tiny bit of Muthness in this painting. I think I did, in the trees, but the figures appear to be undeniably mine (for better or worse). I'm happy with the result.

Conceptual sketch.

In fact, it was after deeply considering the sketch above that I decided to go with a forest setting and carry that over to Things Are Looking Up and Lost in a Riddle.

Back in 2008 I did a very small series of paintings of some of my friends sitting on a green chair. The common idea was they all wore jeans, were barefoot, and my stained-glass-like matrix of geometric patterns was to feature prominently in the backgrounds as well as being seen through the subjects. This is Art and Lindy from one of the unused photos from our shoot for their painting.

For that series I also painted Krista, and Lisa. and Chris, and I shot Kimwun on a green chair during our Kitchen Warfare photo shoot, but I didn't get around to painting that back then...but I will be using two of the green chair photos I shot of her in a couple of upcoming watercolours as part of this current 13-painting run.

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...

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...

U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701-D (1/1400 scale model)

Seven decades after Kirk. I'd been hooked on Star Trek since I was a wee lad in the 1970s, watching reruns of the original series from the '60s, and I enjoyed the movies that came out afterward. When a new series was announced to debut in 1987, I was excited and interested, even though I felt the subtitle "The Next Generation" was cheesy. Nearly 30 years later, I've definitely gotten used to it (but "TNG" is easier to say and type), but I still find it kinda bland. Anyway, the show had fresh new technology and a spanking new design for its main ship, the U.S.S. Enterprise , NCC-1701-D, now the flagship of the Federation. Andrew Probert 's design took some getting used to for me; it had the same basic elements of the original Enterprise (saucer, neck, cylinder, and two cylindrical engines on pylons), but the shapes and volumes were distributed differently, weirdly. Everything looked squished and soft. The organic look of this new ship had me ...

The Naked Silo

Search This Blog