Calyx Krater

My friend saw the vases I had made and asked for one for Christmas. I told him that my next would be a calyx krater (ancient Greek) and he said that he wanted his to be "legit". We haggled over hero counts, but the figures were easier to do than expected. He got Theseus vs the Minotaur on one side and Perseus with Pegasus and Medusa (with a bonus Kraken) on the other. There may be some type of copyright issue with my figure designs, but I processed them to look "legit" enough so that should not be a problem. My only real issue with this is that the paper mache became heavy enough to distort the top when it was wet.

Vases 1 & 2

I imagened in my mind a cardboard vase that would look like a surrealist painting. It would be angular and have the shading all going the wrong way. That did not happen. This is what came out instead. The outer surfaces were painted flat and then drybrushed, accentuating the edges and ripples in my paper mache. Splattering them got paint all over my desk, another sculpture and my mirror.

Cemetery Excitement

Over the summer, I was struck by an interest to do a piece based on a photo of this crypt door at the local cemetery. I was still in abstract mode, so it looks way more exciting and inviting than a cemetery should.

Popcorn Sutton

This is from a sketchbook for an art class. I don't think it's that good because I didn't grid and measure. It looks impressionist to me.

Self Portrait in Plaster

The sculpture class at school was doing plaster casts of people's faces and hands. I was unable to do my hands because of how hairy they are, so she told me to do fingers. I was also given some broken hands that were left behind. I had been looking at the chicken wire all semester, wanting to use it and everyone got a board. I had already spent so much time on my electric garden that I just put the stuff together, added some black and red in a few places and called it done. I really like it because the class was appropriately shocked.

Electric Ikebana

An art teacher at school assigned her sculpture class to make art from items that are not art supplies. I had already done that quite a few times, so I decided to dispose of some of the giant container of broken electronics under my bed. Ikebana is Japanese flower arranging in which the spaces between the flowers are as important as the flowers themselves.

Reggae Bag and Book

I had made a custom bag for myself of hemp twine to use at school. It worked so well that I thought other people should use them too. My Jamaican friend was still nearby at the time and I figured that maybe he could talk someone into buying a bag, so I made it reggae-style. It's pretty self-explanatory, but I will list my materials in the labels as always.

Margins

During my final semester at college, I took easy classes to just get it over with. I hated the school that I had transferred to and had already taken the difficult classes that I needed. This left me sitting in boring lectures, so I drew designs in the margins of my notebook. When school was done, I scanned them all and assembled it.

Rabelais Bolt Book

In my bookbinding quest, I decided to use all of the printing funds in my college account to print like 600 - 800 pages of The Works of Rabelais and bind what came out, with the intention of reading it. I'm relatively happy with the resulting book. The cloth is denim from old jeans and the brown cover material is cheap packing paper with some of my best suminagashi. The label/title/logo was made by layering images of text in photoshop. Structurally, it stays together nicely. I wish I had folded over the denim on top of the suminagashi and installed brads to make it look more professinal. I also wish that I had used double cardboard glued together for the covers and marbled the edges of the text block. Regrets aside, this thing is a BEAST to hold while laying in bed.

Hanzo the Razor

Hanzo the Razor (1972 - 1974)
An awesome trilogy of samurai flicks about a cop with a big dick and a penchant for sexually interrogating women. In this scene, Hanzo is telling off his boss.  I used charcoal, compressed charcoal/graphite (I don't know which) and conte. This was super easy and was finished really quickly.

Child of Rage

Child of Rage: a Story of Abuse (1990)
This is one of my favorite documentaries because the little girl talks about wanting to kill her foster family with knives, torturing her brother, masturbating, hurting pets and killing baby birds. I used charcoal, conte and colored pencils.

C10D4M12SP3SU5

Since I'm doing abstract paintings and photoshop layers, why not combine 1 of each? The name is to keep track of what went into the final image: Cut paper 10, Decalcomania 4, Marbleizing 12, Spray 3 and Suminagashi 5.

Marbleizing 8&9

When I marbleized spray paint this winter, I tried photoshop layers on that, but it didn't work as well as with decalcomania. This is the best one that I made from that series.

Decalcomania Layers 1&2

I was doing decalcomania with tempera on plastic for a while in the summer of abstraction and spray. Layering my first 2 decalcomanias in photoshop turned out pretty nice.

Psychedelic Collage 1

This is what happens when I play with color curves on image editing software. The original (left) has a pencil and pen background with parts of the tempera print from my video collaged on. I then scanned it and started changing color settings.

Bottle Blast

During my summer of abstraction and sprays, I decided that a larger piece was called for. This is exactly the size and shape of my coffee table that I was working on. All in spray paint, paint in spray bottles, cut paper and just a little bit of sharpie. The blobular mass coming out of the left spray bottle is from a video that I made by pouring tempera paint on plexiglass. It would have been a shame to waste the psychedelic design, so I made my first print without knowing.

Grasshopper

The final assignment for drawing class was an insect. I selected a grasshopper because it provided just enough interest to be worth drawing, but would not require illustrating individual hairs. The grasshopper itself is mostly watercolor with some charcoal and conte. The background is charcoal, pencil, conte and sharpie.

Street - Winter, College

One day, I got out of class early and had to wait for the computer lab to open. I had also forgotten my sketchbook. OH NO! After stopping by the print shop to get brown paper, I went to a high window in a stairwell to draw whatever I saw there. This is in charcoal and conte. The first is my source drawing and the second is edited for color and contrast.

Copper Plate Engraving

This was the last assignment in printmaking class. I made my engraving and printed it on good paper, but liked the paper towel much more. I even wasted a whole class painting it with watercolors.

Linocuts

This was the first assignment for printmaking class: linoleum stamps of an insect, animal, plant, mineral, and vegetable. I added technology because I could. So bat, spider, dinosaur bones, venus flytrap, derailleur, Carolina Reaper hot pepper. This is printed on paper towel and color corrected to green.

Is This College?

This was made when I switched schools in 2016. The previous school had seemed more cohesive, together and had a more varied cast of characters. The new one was all separate buildings populated by a homogeneous group of students who I could not relate to. The background sky is watercolor. I used a more modern phone to photograph the buildings and collage them together. Other students are clipped from brochures advertising this school. I photographed myself and traced most of the outlines to begin my drawing in pencil, sharpie and colored pencil.

Industrial Parking Lot

A band that I played in was practicing in an industrial building and our drummer was always late, so I would take primitive photos with my slider phone while I waited. This was one of the better photos that I turned into a drawing. The buildings and foliage are colored pencil. The parking lot itself is duct tape with ink on top and the puddles are watercolor.

Bookbinding

I learned bookbinding in printmaking class as well. The top set are little dollar store notebooks that I glued together and made covers with clasps for. The bottom set I cut the paper and sewed the binding as well.

Mike

I visited a friend from the school that I went to after high school during a recent summer. His girlfriend took this photo of us. 30x40 yellow construction paper from a roll. I penciled the outlines, used watercolor to start, switched to my acrylic/tempera blend and finished with oil pastels. The whole deal got gloss clear spray paint to seal it all in.

Suminagashi

My printmaking professor told me about this and I just had to do it. The idea is to float ink on water and print off the surface.

Spray Paint Marbelizing #15

I took a printmaking class last semester and found out about marbelizing paper by putting oil-based paint or ink on water. My professor also told me about Suminagashi, the Japanese version. I ordered supplies to do it the Japanese way, but they take so long to ship. Here I am with spray paint, a container, lots of different papers and water... What to do? This individual piece has black, purple, orange and silver printed onto canvas. There are about 50 of these with different colors on different materials, but I'm not making 50 posts or putting all the images in one. This is the best.

Medieval Midnight

I had been messing around with spray paint and paint in spray bottles most of last summer, making abstract stuff. I decided to get representational for a bit once I knew how my materials worked. From top to bottom:
The sky is all spray paint, except the blue, which was from a spray bottle. I used a toothpick dipped in model enamel to make the stars.
The castle was spray painted grey and then had spray bottles of black, white and grey on it.
The town is all spray paint: black, brown and yellow.
I used hand cut paper stencils to isolate sections. The little yellow windows were a bitch because I had to use so much paint to get a good saturation that they leaked all over and had to be touched up with black around the edges.

Pickles in a Glass Tray

I was playing with my DSLR camera at a family gathering and captured a beautiful image of some pickles. Not really caring about the results, I went wild. I started with the yellow roll construction paper 24" x 36" and spray painted my base colors. Then came my special blend of acrylic and tempra paint and I finished it off with oil pastel. This was just for fun and I didn't stress about photorealism.

Radu Vladislas

Jesse and Pippi were too happy and cheerful. They needed a scary guy to keep them company on my wall. This is Radu from the Subspecies film series played by anders Hove. He's on the brown packing paper and 28" x 38". He was created mostly with black tempra paint. There is some charcoal and white and brown conte crayon as well.

Pippi Longstocking

Jesse Stewart had come out alright and it was cool drawing really big. I decided to go for some color on Pippi Longstocking. She's 30" x 40" on yellow construction paper from a roll that I got for free. I used charcoal and hard pastels. This is Inger Nilsson Pippi from the 1969 TV series.

Jesse Stewart

I had taken a drawing class at school and was getting good with charcoal. I was also obsessed with Jesse Stewart's music and the song, "Cold Beer" specifically. This is 44" x 28" on brown packing paper.