Gift Art - Hyperbole and a Half

A friend introduced me to Hyperbole and a Half last week. I was having a really bad day and spent the rest of the day (and several of the next days) reading the entire blog and laughing uproariously.  Check it out if you haven't already and you like to laugh. If you don't like to laugh, what is wrong with you?

Anywho, the whole way through, I was thinking I need to be her best friend!!!!  I want to thank her for keeping my loved ones safe from me by distracting me and making me laugh when I just wanted to be a giant stomping destroying monster of some sort.  So I painted this for her this afternoon.  I think it does a good job of displaying my gratitude (and it gave me a good reason to stare at a photo of Brett Favre):

Again, this was painted like the last piece, there was no sketching of the face first, just jumped right in with patches of color.  I like to imagine people can tell the difference. Pieces where I sketch the face first are usually painted much smoother than this, my signature style.

On Break

So I finished up about 21 of the pieces for the art gig that I am doing.  More are supposed to be coming in June. 
I have come to realize that my favorite way of paintings is kinda monochrome and expressionist.  I have done quite a few pieces this way, but while working on this project, I was tasked with the following portrait and man, I loved it.  It just emerged out of me.  Instead of sketching out the face first, I just started with blotches of color and built them up until the image was created. I feel like an "actual artist" when I work this way, whatever that means.  I'm just creating and not thinking about it... and more often than not, it works out, really well. So I give you the pre-production version of the portrait which now belongs to Disruptor Beam, LLC: