Nite Lite

I always love seeing pictures of new deep sea fish. They look positively alien with their own light sources and nasty mouths full of crooked teeth. I can only imagine Noah's reaction when he hauled a pair of these fish up into the Ark's saltwater tank (Noah would have understood that a downpour containing enough freshwater to flood the entire Earth would have adversely effected the salinity of the oceans enough to kill almost all life adapted to the briny deep).

This piece is 6" X 6" and it took 4-5 hours.

Isabellyfish

Happy Holidays.

This piece is the first of 5 paintings that will all go together as an underwater scene for Isabella's room. There will be one central canvas with 4 little canvases around it (if a Triptych is 3 paintings will this be a Quintych?... spell check says no!).

I will post these over the next few days in the order I've painted them. Jellyfish first, and I'm hoping to have all 5 pieces hanging in Bella's room before the New Year. The canvas is only 6" X 6" my smallest painting yet. I was hoping that the small size and relatively independent nature of the pieces would lend themselves to me being able to start and finish a painting in one or two sittings, but that proved a little too optimistic. This one probably only took 4-5 hours.

Original 1

It's been a while since I've posted, sorry for the delay. I've been busy and I've managed to start 4 or 5 new paintings without finishing any of them. Hopefully it won't be another 2 months between postings.

This is the first painting of what I hope is a 6 piece series. I wanted to paint the NHL's original 6 franchises as you would have seen them on cards from the mid-fifties. Those old cards usually had a splash background in some ugly colour, with a cut-out action pose from the player.

The player is not a specific person, I just wanted to capture a 50's Brylcreem look with some of that great old leather equipment. This piece is 12" X 16" and the white border is measured in such a way to give the interior painting the exact dimensions of a hockey card. This was my first painting on Canvas Board, and it is acrylic paint. I'm about 2/3rds done the next one in this series (Boston Bruins), and I hope I have enough steam to do all 6 teams. I'm a little intimidated by the Chicago Blackhawks logo, and the Toronto Maple Leafs logo from the 50's as well. This one took about 45 hours in total.

The Night Game

This piece took a long time to realise as I found myself very busy with some series work. I was sketching bats for a children's book concept and I was struck by the visual absurdity of setting their entire world upside down. I drew these two 'fruit' bats in various poses and outfits but in the end I really liked them just having a mundane game of 21 or H.O.R.S.E. Going with my upside down world creates a few mechanical issues for basketball, but these bats are young earth creationists so they don't let the theory of gravity get in the way of their fun.

I really like how the tree bark detail turned out, I put a lot of effort into it. I also like the transparency to the wings. The signature is upside down on purpose in keeping with my topsy-turvy theme, and I realize it's not a 'night' scene but my title 'The Night Game' is for the bats... because to them daytime is nighttime. This painting is 12"x36", acrylic on canvas and it was probably 50 hours all together (though it has been hard to track as this piece was started about a month ago).

Street Scene

This is another digital development piece for the same project I posted for earlier. I am quickly realizing that my favorite colour is green. This was painted in photoshop, but the B&W art work was hand drawn in inks and scanned. It's dark and moody, which is what I was going for. It's not particularly artful in style but it got the job done.

Zombies come in Threes!

This painting was inspired by some doodles I was sketching during a confluence of morbid events. Michael Jackson had just died, so I was being nailed by all the creepy autopsy death talk as well as inundated by images from the Thriller video. At the same time a few other celebrities had died and I was being bludgeoned by the ridiculous and recurring myth that celebrity deaths come in three's... obviously if death comes in three's than zombies would also logically follow this apparently natural numerology. On top of that I was reading Mary Roach's excellent book entitled 'Stiff - The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers' which deals with decomposition, willing your body to science, and the human history of how we deal with our dead. Suffice it to say I couldn't really stop drawing zombies and skulls, and this painting is the end result. The piece is acrylic on canvas, 12" X 12", and it took me about 22 hours total.

Development Painting

This is a digital piece I did for a development project. It was painted in Photoshop, after all the hand drawn ink layers were scanned in to the computer. I really concentrated on the mood and the time of day. I wanted it to appear misty or hazy so close to the river, and I wanted to peg the time at about 3:00 am. The bridge was referenced from some very old stock photos of New York City.