We don't need no stinkin' badges!

It's Cinco de Mayo. I am aware of that.  I am pretty good at recognizing holidays.
So last night, as I was going to sleep after reading Stephen King's Dark Tower - The Gunslinger, it occurred to me that I should do a "black velvet painting" to honor Cinco de Mayo and that it should be a gun slinging kinda of pinup.  And then, I shouted, as I often do, thanks to the movie UHF, "WE DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' BADGERS!" which startled my husband who was trying to sleep, and I was reminded of the movie "Treasure of Sierra Madre" and then I pictured something close to this painting in my mind.   I must also say that I was inspired by the black velvet world in the X-BOX video game, "Psychonauts" (which is an AWESOME game, all the way, but the end stage is freaking impossible. Like totally.. =[ ).

So here it is, STINKIN' BADGES!:

Look at it big, her face looks wonky all small like.

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:

Gods of Rock - Ongoing Project

So, as I mentioned, I was contracted to do 30 portraits for an upcoming video game.  I have finished the first 5 portraits in the past three days.  Only 25 more to go. ;)

Here they are:

Paintings by me. Copyright Disruptor Beam LLC.

I had the wrong dimensions on the first one, and I thought to double check but alas, I didn't. *sigh* Thankfully, they were able to stretch it to fit.  Anywho, these are them.  Five tiny paintings. I did them at about 4 times this size and then shrunk them down to the required size.  James gave me the most trouble. I had to employ the help of my friend, Beth, who is also an artist, to tell me what I was getting wrong because I was too close to it to see it. She helped a whole lot!

Well shucks, it turns out I was on the very wrong track. I've taken down the pictures and shall go back to work and try to get it right this time. =)

Migraine Art

I was trying to describe to my friends what my migraine aura looks like (I rarely get them but have gotten two in the past three days) and I thought it might just be easier to paint it. It is a quick sketch, but this is what I see when I close my eyes when I have an aura.  Of course, it moves and swims, so I can never look at it directly, but I always think of it as an Aboriginal lizard. Of course again, it is made of light so imagine this flashing and every triangle cycling a flash between the white, yellow, pink, and blue... there is clear in there too, with white outlines.  When my eyes are open, the lizard flashes and swims and blocks out whatever I am looking at.

Upcoming art

I am sorry for my silence.  I am still here, I just haven't been creating a durned thing.  I shall be, shortly though, as I have been contracted to start a series of mini paintings for a video game.  I shall surely post them here while I work on the 30 pieces I will be doing. I am to begin Wednesday.  Until then, Aloha Makapi'pi!

Block Cipher Video

One of my first forays into video creation and editing was had this week.
Luc needed help with a remake of one of his previous videos and requested my help, and since I like him okay, I agreed.

Basically, I needed to listen to his audio and storyboard it.  Then I created each frame in Painter 11 and edited them together using Windows Live Movie Maker.  My favorite frames follow:

Of course, it was way more work than all that.  For a 9 minute video there was approximately 2 hours of storyboarding,  14 hours of actually drawing, arranging, and creating frames, and then 2 hours of video editing (in which I had to create a few more slides that I found I needed that were not storyboarded.  It was about 72 handmade frames all together.

Check out the video all put together over on Luc's channel on YouTube. =)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVqgdAy0XjQ