ZOMBIES!

Halloween is my favorite holiday, and that means I spend more time getting ready for it than I do other holidays. This year I'm adding zombies to my spooky yard.

As you can see, my yard last year was spider infested. I don't think that the spiders will be going away, but Zombies will be making an appearance.

Cara, the mummified corpse victim of the spiders is being upgraded to a zombie. She's getting a new(ish) paint job, some wiring to help her stand, and new hands.

We've got two new fellas joining Cara. There's Crawley and Walker. Crawley is half formed, and Walker is a fully formed zombie.

Crawley is complete at this point asside from accessories. I need to mess up his shirt, and maybe add an earring or something.

Walker needs his hands finished, he needs feets, and clothing needs to be aged and ratted up.

Think I may be adding a grammy zombie too...and IF I do, I'll be doing a walk through on how I build her. Until then, enjoy the zombies!

Warning: Personal Crap to Follow

I quit 'vaping' (smoking the e-cigarette), and have been nicotine/habit free for about a month now!

We've gotten a Keurig coffee machine and it is awesome. Coffee's taking the place of my cigarette habit. Good thing that studies show that coffee adds to longevity.

We did lose Mom, and my life's been kind of upside down for all that. I'm getting by, but it's a huge huge change. I always knew it would be just an earth-shattering change, but until it happened, I had no idea how it would feel.

Turning Thrift Store Art into ...um... art.

I'm a StumbleUpon addict (It's a firefox and chrome add-on), and I find my self 'stumbling' for waaay too long at a time, but it often turns out to give me some great ideas. For instance, Stumble threw me to an article on altering thrift store art. From there, I fell in love.

My girlfriend an I were dropping off some donations at the local Good Will, and I found a print of painting by Ruane Manning for $2.75. It was all framed up and everything. The frame was in bad shape, and the plexiglass was scratched to pieces, but the art was completely intact!...until I bought it.

I've taken cell phone pictures of the painting, after I 'finished' it, and they ended up blurry. I'm posting them anyway, given the subject matter (which should always be photographed in blurry conditions), and the fact that I don't own the rights to Ruane Manning's original piece. I wonder if parody laws come into effect on this?

Wish me luck in trying to get this new Bigfoot painting hung successfully in my dining room (sans protests!)

Airbrushing shirts

I've been playing away with my new airbrush, and I finally have things worth showing for my troubles! I've been airbrushing t shirts (the classiest of all things to airbrush).

The brown shirt is mine, it's a winged frog, the black shirt is Sarah's. It's me in a gas mask...I'm guessing you already knew that though. Both of these shirts were heat set with an iron, and have made it through the wash, so we know the paint took. The frog shirt's wing faded just a bit near the edge, so last night late, I added a little paint, then heat set it again, for longer and hotter. Hopefully this time it will take.

Both are done using Frisket stencils that I designed. The frog is a particularly simple stencil. It's just the outline of the frog and an outline of the wing (as separate pieces). All the detail on it was added by hand. As a result, the frog was more fun to make, too.

I've gotten a few more blank shirts over the weekend, so I will be experimenting with different stencil types, air pressures for the compressor and what not, even more. I'm also considering trying my hand at some 'fine art' airbrushing, but I don't quite feel like I'm there, yet.

As you are aware, this has slowed down work on my dolls...but it also means that now I will be able to airbrush them instead of just normal brushing them!

Some Paintings

The reason I have not yet finished the rat doll, or even made a TON of progress on her, is because I stop working on her from time to time to pursue other artistic endeavors. Like painting! These four paintings have all been done in the last couple of weeks, and are all acrylic, and all 16 inches by 20 inches on gallery wrapped canvas.

The first one is a gas mask, which is a theme I enjoy, and has a palate limited to four colors. The second, which I've tentatively titled 'Stable' is also a four color palate. The Fox painting, which I finished last night, has five colors, and the Batman Beyond painting (which is just something to hang over my action figure collection) has four colors. I used to be a little crazier with my palates, but I seem to do better work if I really really limit how many tubes of paint I am working with. Four seems to be the most common number of late, but I think I've done them with as few as three. I'm not yet brave enough to do a painting with just two colors, but maybe soon.

In doll news, I have cut and baked the arms, so the rat doll has elbows, but I've not yet hooked the hands to them. Currently, I've got a batch of clay bits in the oven for my other doll, along with some teeth I'm baking for a wall sculpture, more on the wall sculpture later.

Enjoy the rest of your day, and I will likely reveal more as to what I am making and working on tomorrow.

Boxes, Sculpting, Painting

Today, instead of moving forward on any of the stuff I've talked about in the past week or so, I'm ending up working on a bunch of things that are kind of under the radar.

I just got done staining three wood boxes. I also stained my fingers, but that's beside the point. The boxes are all wood burned with different stuff on them, and they look fairly good, especially as I've never stained wood before. One has a donkey on it, one has a fox on it, and the last one has a pair of bunnies on it.

I've been working slowly slowly on a new doll, and I'm working on improving articulation, so hopefully this one will be more poseable than the ones in the past. If it works out, I'll go into it in more detail later.

I'm also going to be working on my Story Teller doll, who is easily the biggest doll I've ever attempted. He'd be over two feet tall, standing. He needs pants and boots and some paint on his neck and he's pretty much done. Can't wait to be showing off this guy.

For now, that's it. Once the boxes are fully stained, I can reclaim my art desk and will use it to work on my kitchen cabinets. For now, I have to wait, because if I get glue on the kitchen table, I'll never hear the end of it.

Two Paintings part 5

Alright, I've went with two paintings instead of three this time, because I couldn't get three together arranged in any kind of useful way on the blog. Not a huge problem, though. I'll just wait to post a third one.

First up is "The Joker" which is exactly what it claims to be. It's 24"x30" Acrylic on canvas, and is currently framed and hanging above my mantle. It's not for sale and never will be, as I'm very hesitant to do any real copyright infringement. DC Comics is owned by Warner Bros. now, anyway...they are powerful. I did this piece specifically to go in my living room, which is slowly turning into a shrine for DC heroes and villains.

Second up is "Good Book" it's 16"x20" Acrylic on Gallery Wrapped Canvas. It was sort of an experiment in shadows, more than anything else. It's also just a standard anthro painting. No real story behind it, other than I wanted to see how such a painting would turn out.

Next up will be my attempts at the whole DIY "Urban Vinyl" Toys. If you aren't familiar with the term, you can either look it up, or wait until tomorrow!

Two Paintings part 4

First up, we've got "Gas Mask Monk" (not very creative, sue me). It's 24"X30" Acrylic on Gallery wrapped canvas. It's a bit of a post apocalyptic, with a nice touch of Tibetan Buddhism thrown in for good measure.

The monk's robe is a little brighter than a traditional Tibetan Buddhist robe, which is a break from normal post apocalyptic works...but I didn't want to do another brown painting. I'm not sure where buddhists stand tattoos, but this guy's got one.

The second piece is an untitled soldier. It is 12"x24" Acrylic on Gallery Wrapped Canvas. The odd size really dictated layout to me. Not much to say about this one, it was more playing than planning.

Next up will be the donkey costume update.

Two Paintings part 3

Two more paintings today!

The first, "Crescent and Fae" is loosely based on a digital painting I did some time ago called "The Crescent Experiment." The wizardly creature is a bit different in this one, but close enough that he could be related to the other one.

It's 36"X24" acrylic on gallery wrapped canvas. It was a paint in the butt in a lot of ways...the robe in particular did not want to ever satisfy me with it's shading. The little fire fairy was just for fun and to give the crescent wizard something to talk to. Having a primary color palate was interesting to work with. Lots of red, blue and yellow with no purple or green or orange (maybe a little orange) was kind of odd. Anyway, it's huge and I'm happy with it.

The Green Dragon basking was one of my first paintings in this entire series, being done in mid May. It's 24"X30" acrylic on canvas. Lots of browns, yellows and greens. He's an entirely different dragon style than the red dragon, and it makes him look way more peaceful than the red, which looks to be half starved and a little insane. The green dragon was based a lot on dinosaurs and actual lizards in terms of it's head shape and body shape, where as the red dragon has the mammalian predator body shape.

As a side note, I made the frames for both the Green Dragon Basking, and for the Cyclops Sunset out of hardware store stuff. Maybe a post about that, later.

I'm taking a break for the holiday, and will be back Tuesday with more stuff...either the donkey costume progress report or two more paintings.