Katmai Eagle

Remember this guy? This past summer I was commissioned to do a larger version of it - 16"x24". It has caused a lot of blood, sweat and tears but I think it came out a lot better than I thought it would. I've decided furry critters are much simpler to paint and I look forward to returning to painting abandoned mechanical/structural things. :) For fun, here's an animated gif of the progress photos I took.

Tree Eagle

oil on canvas
6"x9"
Nov 4, 2012

I did this quick little eagle as procrastination before getting into my big Katmai Eagle painting. :)

Rage Planet

Rage Planet
Photoshop CS4 • 3.5 hrs
November 12, 2012

Done for an ad campaign. Followed a "how to make a planet" tutorial I've used before using my own photos. Had to come up with how to make it all cracked and angry on my own, though. Thought the magnetosphere warped halo was a nice touch. I might clean up some of the cracks a bit later, though.

Katmai Otter

Oil on canvas paper
October 28, 2012
1.5 hrs, from a photo I took

Since I've been back from Katmai I have a lot of painting planned. This was done as a bit of homework to shake out the cobwebs. I struggle with a lot of art anxiety (there's a great book about this by Rollo May called "The Courage to Create" if you are interested) and a big part of my struggle is that I try to be perfect all the time. I can't just sit down and CREATE. I noticed this summer that doing those animal paintings came rather easily and I think that is because I'd told myself that working with substandard materials was going to prevent 'perfection' and so I ended up relaxing and enjoying it a bit more. So I did this painting of momma otter (made famous in a series of GoPro videos filmed by my coworker Jackie McNamara in Brooks Camp) in the same style as those other paintings.

As a bit of an extra, here are the videos Jackie made:

Katmai Art 2012

I was away all summer working at Brooks Lodge in Katmai National Park, AK for the second time. This year I took thousands more photos than last time, and with a better camera, too. I also put together a miniature oil painting kit with cheap paint (I had no way of keeping palettes so had to throw away anything I didn't use each session and didn't want to throw out good paint) and cheap brushes (I couldn't find short handled nice brushes for oils at short notice).

In all I did 9 small oil paintings, mostly of bears. I sold three of them before I could take photos of them so all I have to remember them by are mediocre photocopies that I scanned in to share here. Even so, it was a good experience. The cheap paint and brushes were VERY frustrating to work with and forced me to let go of my perfectionism for a little while. With the mindset of, "Well, I can't paint perfectly with substandard materials," I was able to simply let go, rock out to some European metal, and PAINT. 4 the first day, 3 the next time, and 2 the last session.

Below, the art appears in chronological order. All but one were painted on canvas paper, the one oddball was done on a mini 2x2" canvas panel. All but that mini panel and the squirrel are 6" x 9"; the squirrel is like 3.5" x 12" or something.

I plan on keeping up the theme for a while as an exercise. They're pretty quick for me to do, taking between 30min to 2 hours. I am planning on making prints of some kind of a few of them; squirrel and splashing bear are the most popular. What do you think?

UPDATE: Rosas in Vector

A long time ago (2006?) I made a LOT of desktop wallpapers themed after the characters of the anime Maria Sama ga Miteru. Many of those wallpapers are probably floating around the internet somewhere - I know most of them survive in my Photobucket. At the beginning of my Marimite art career, I was doing most of my work in Photoshop. One trio of wallpapers I created always stuck in my mind as something I should update by re-creating them in Illustrator. The idea for them was simple and elegant and it was a shame I'd only done them in 3:4 aspect ratio for small screens.

So at one point this summer I had some free time on my hands and so for fun I re-built those wallpapers! Here they are, in one size only (1920 x 1200) done in Adobe Illustrator, September 15, 2012:

Painting Haiku

Here's my 11-hour (into 2 minutes!) time lapse video of me painting "Haiku".



The song is "Solipsist" by Kaki King off her album Legs to Make Us Longer. Check out her music - she's fantastic.

(Disclaimer: song used without any kind of permission. I made absolutely no profit from this video, nor from the painting since it was a gift.)

Haiku

"Haiku" • oil on illustration board
15"x11" • approx. 11 hours

I'm always keeping my eyes open for striking photographs taken by friends and family that could be a great basis for a painting. Years ago my friend Rachel took this awesome photo of her cat, Haiku (a very awesome and charismatic cat), and I knew when I saw it that I just had to paint it. But I wanted to do it in secret for an occasion, like her birthday or Christmas.

I finally had the time and energy to do the Haiku painting this year. Unfortunately, Haiku passed away about a week before Christmas. That kind of lended extra sentimentality to creating the painting and giving it to my friend.

Below are the progress photos (click to see them larger) - they're more yellow than they should be, ah well. I also took a time-lapse video of myself painting it using Gawker that I will upload soon.