Woot! Fridays

. . . er uh I mean Saturdays. I had like 3 hrs of fun finding the perfect combination of colors, since Woot! dropped the number you could use. Now its 6 colors, it used to be 8. You know you'd be surprised what you can do with two extra colors on your pallet. Needless to stay it can be a challenge finding the right correlation of image colors to t-shirt swatch.

I'm please, but looking forward to next week's challenge. I hope it has to do with monkeys or peanut butter. Or both.

Update:

They cut me because I didn't use the "heather grey" texture and just used a grey color to submit my image on. So its good to know for future submissions that grey is never just grey if its "Heather Grey".

retitled: The Princess has Been Found

*granted this is a terrible representation of this picture, since I broke my usual camera, and now I'm using an aquatic digital camera, designed to photograph underwater.

. . . well now that I think about it, dried acrylic is a plastic, and plastics ARE waterproof, I bet I could put this under water and film it.

Process continued. . .

First I have found that if I tone the canvas a vibrant color, then it helps set the mood as the piece develops its self

Then I start filling in the black, or the negative space.

Next I started to add the white tones of the masked men, and it helps the creepy feeling

Then to make the princess' flesh, I toned the areas that I wanted to paint.

Then I establish a lighting source. Directly overhead. I was trying to make it look like a stage production of a dream I had about this piece

Ok so, this is when the picture took a drastic turn, since the Polaroid is painted on. I was woken up in the middle of the night by an epiphany dealing with glazes and acrylic, and the entire time I was having this lucid dream-like epiphany, the area I wanted to paint had a Polaroid frame floating around it. I awoke and traced around a Polaroid that I had and began glazing away.

Here I'm trying to mix the stark white of the Polaroid into the very dark imagery around it. I really need to get better models of breasts, and thighs. Colonel Sanders where are you when I need you?!

Woot-ing

My roomate turned me on to this website: http://shirt.woot.com/

Every Thursday they have a derby (contest) and a theme for designing T-shirts on their website.

Last week was 'Nightmares':

I got 73rd place

This week's theme is 'Palindromes':

So far I'm in 50th place, and the voting ends on Thursday at noon (CT).

The top 3 designs get made into a shirts, and the artist can earn $1000 or keep the royalties to the work and get $500 upfront.

I'll admit, I'm not the best at working digitally, but I think this might be a good opportunity at working on a fast turnaround deadline, and on a limited pallet (no more than 8 colors). Plus I get to play with photoshop, which is not something I prefer, but in this day and age is very necessary.

UPDATE:

I placed 65th for one big reason--image on yellow. Personally I love the color yellow. It reminds me of summer, old peoples houses and liquor stores. However the biggest complaint I got from the voters on Woot was that the illustration was on yellow. So I posted other colors that the image would work on without loosing anything. Lessons to keep in mind for the next derby

Death Begets Sleep

I feel like half the fun of making art is the process. Which I have not been showing. So here it goes.

The image is of a Egyptian "goddess", or Cleopatra. She has killed her self on sleeping pills, hence the bottle and cap in her hands. The creepy things, are supposed to be death servants, or minions, all wearing the mask of Michael Jackson on all their faces. Didn't you know, the underworld is all over the Michael paraphernalia. Now to make color comps and then transfer the drawing to canvas and paint it.

Fur is Familiar

Since I've been working on calendars for this year, under a another nom de plum (www.cupofmiso.com), I haven't posted any images on this blog in a while.

But now that I'm back to the groove of painting,

"Fur is Familiar", Acrylic, 11x14"

If you would believe it, this pictures was supposed to be simply of a little girl sleeping on the belly of a big dog. Thats where the title comes from. But some along the way, the dog got hit by a car and his blood turned Pepto Bismol pink.

Make me some money, Munny!

As promised I am posting images of my D-I-Y Munny before he goes off to market. Hopefully I learn not to sell it this time for five magic beans.