Friday, September 21, 2007

Faucets Reloaded


So enough of experimenting, I wanted to get back to a painting that I had started a couple of months ago but hadn't worked on in a while. You know, you just never know which paintings are going to look really good and which ones are going to disappoint you. I started this one on a whim and based it on a tiny little corner picture I saw in an old comic book. Someone asked my to do a painting of a girl crying--but not just crying, really crying. All right. You know, the whole damsel in distress thing. I get it. So I started it thinking not much, but then the more I worked on it the more I realized just how pretty it was becoming. The colors on it really seemed to work and it just ended up being really nice to look at. That's always my goal: to create a painting that you want to look at. I'm not going for any pseudo-intellectual pompousness here and I don't think anybody is going to be "challenged." It's just nice to look at. I'm happy.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Musty Old Comics


Hi again. It's been about a month, but you know how these things go. But anyway, I was looking through a couple of old comic books that I have, and between sneezes brought on my my mold allergies I was noticing how faded and ratty they were looking. Then I thought, hey, that's actually kind of cool looking. As I am wont to do, I started wondering if such a thing could be reproduced on canvas. It seemed obvious what I should do, so I mixed a little bit of sepia shaded brown, some matte medium and a lot of water. The idea was that I would slowly start adding a number of very thin lowers of sepia over the painting and see if it gave the look I wanted. I used a painting that I basically wasn't all that happy with to experiment on and I'm glad that I did. I'm not hugely thrilled with the results, but it doesn't look bad. I didn't want the sepia tone to be even because discoloration of comics isn't even, so I purposefully made it a little blotchy. In retrospect this may have been a mistake. I'm still wondering how I could reproduce various stains for maybe even crinkly pages. At this point I wouldn't say the experiment is a success, but I think it still warrants looking into. If anyone has any thoughts, feel free to offer them.