I feel I can blame it on the impending arrival of offspring and get on with it.

the Devil

Couple paintings are done and there’s now a nice angel and demon in 24×24″ panels in the front hall. You know.. to scare people away from the good art that covers the rest of the house.

So the current plans (subject to revision but hey I feel better when I can pretend life’s going according to some sort of plan) is to prep the baby room and get the 2 paintings finished in time for baby Jude to arrive.    Then it’s baby time and squeezing in the last touches on Mutant Sheep Eat The Planet! and get that finished out by Summer in addition to getting some more freelance work and getting Wenderflonia all set up and ready to take over the art world.

The entry to the kitchen

Wow time sure does fly, and whoa am I so totally not going to make the Oct 31 deadline! Which more or less means that November and December are going to be choked with Holidays and Family.

And it turns out there’s a little baby boy inbound, eta Feb 25(ish) (holy crap!)

So that has got to be more or less the last deadline, beacause somehow I don’t think there’s gonna be much free time after that for a while.

So, you might ask, what the hell have you been doing for the last 18 days.   Well, Mutant Sheep progress has been slow… much slower than I wanted but I seriously needed a break. More After the Break, Pictures too!So having been Marvelously inspired by Super GFW over at wenderflonia.com and watching her paint and get messy all over the kitchen.  I just had to have a go at it.

But First I had some WAY overdue paintings for Lil Niece Mia who was returning to the country  Oct 1.

So  after much obsessing and sketching I wound up with 2 11×18 canvases

So after that I was on a roll and Ready to slap some paint around.

First up was just a basic 2 hour blending exercise on a 8×11 canvasboard

I should go back and finish the background on it, maybe…

Then after that I had this wonderful 12 x 24 Museum canvas that I was dying to slap some paint on.

I wound up with a wood nymphy type critter lady.  (it looks better in real life the computer makes the color blanch a good bit)

Overall I’m happy with it. The atmospheric perspective  worked better than I had hoped and the Musculature shading works overall.   Compositionally though, it’s a bit eerie, her eye wound up dead center, which is kinda disquieting.

Overall I’m  happy with it, and plan on going back in a month or two and making a series of refining tweaks.  But I’m gonna not look at it for a while so to see it with fresh eyes.  I Have a 24×24 blank canvas sitting behind me right now.. It wants something red and firey on it..

But first

MUST WORK ON MUTANT SHEEP.

Now I haven’t been completely unproductive, the rules have gotten a fairly comprehensive re-write for clarification and another 11 cards (see this post’s image for 3 of em) have been Drawn, Inked, and scanned,  and 4 other cards have been painted and are ready to be placed.

This weekend I plan to at least paint those 11 and get them placed.   Oh and I also did an asset audit and made a nice excel sheet so I can see exactly how much I’ve got to go at all times. Total assets are 978mb as of now, stored in a subversion repository mirrored on a personal server with backups on 3 distinct physical locations.

Ok that’s It for today.

So it only took a little under 7 months, this weekend I finally wrapped up the behemoth that’s been hanging in the kitchen since January. The biggest change was wiping out the sun, which I spent so much time into getting perfect the first time around. However it just wasn’t working. Once the sun got off the canvas the remainder just fell into place.

While it was fun for the most part, I’m seriously gonna think twice before starting another canvas of that size. It just takes so long and so much effort you wind up just tired of it before you’re halfway, and then once part comes out brilliant, just as imagined, everything else seems sub-par. Thank god it wasn’t in oils though, or I’d just be starting the glazes.

Next up, a commissioned (I barter for exotic liquor) series of cute jungle animals for a cute little niece. Lions, gazelles, giraffes and a penguin(?) oh My!

Ok so it’s been a bit hectic with a bunch of things that just had to get done, which turns out to have sapped my usual laser like (HAH!) focus.

But the creative itch is growing and I have a feeling I’ll be cracking open the acrylics soon.  (that and I owe lil sis some cute animal pix for superbaby’s room).

With the help of GuitarTricks.com I’ve been attempting to get a grasp on the whole playing guitar thing, and I’m getting better.  The best thing I did was to buy a decent guitar (Rouge acoustic/electric Dreadnought from musiciansfriend.com), not having to slice your fingers trying to jam down the strings makes a huuge difference, and it sounds better too) .

Other than that, a super co-operative project with GFW is underway and we’re having fun and getting some serious progress made.

Programming at work, however, is pretty much making sure it’s the last thing I want to go home and do as well.. so BSDDoD! may have to stay on the backburner for a while.

But first, vacation in 18 days.

Sunball texture you want to touch!

But the sun texture is very cool!

I’m going to need to buy some more blue paint before I start to play with the sunlit sky..   Gah  and I’ve used almost half a tube of white so far..  oh well.

Kinda weird tho.. I didn’t work on the parts I wanted to work on.. 

Day 5 - The Darkening

{edit:  oops this was day 5}

when theres no more room on the palette its time to stop.

I got 2 sides of the planet rendered… Not really happy about the empty hillside one… but not really sure what to add to it.  maybe something will come to me overnight.

Kinda went totally ocd on the plantlife  (thanks wen) 

here’s a detail 

Anyway.. it’s a good day’s progress i think.. tomorrow I’m seriously going to have to tackle the gears in the planet and figure out how to get things to work together.. oh well.

I wound up having a great time, put on the headphones and tuned out the universe for 2 hours… bliss!

Anyway  here’s a crappy cellphone picture (color corrected in photoshop) (and the trees were still wet so that’s why theyre shiny.)

Day three- earth and grass

Took the plunge and started on a big canvas..  It’s definitely a big project, maybe a little too big.. but it’s actually been a lot of fun so far..

first steps

here’s the (1) initial sketch done as a doodle during a meeting at work. (2) A brief color rough / enlargement done in about 20 minutes on the pc.  and (3) finally the first couple of scribbles to get it onto the freshly gessoed canvas.

Drawing on canvas.

Here’s a picture of the canvas with more of the sketch transferred.

The Sun and Moon and the Stars

Not a bad start  Got most of the base colors for everything laid in..

Yaay and It’s actually quite addictive, and embeddable into myspace/facebook etc etc.  I’ve got a whole list of secondary features to add to it and minor bugs to iron out.  

I’ve been playing with the acrylics again and starting to get a feel for it.  Maybe things actually get easier with practice…. nahh.  Anyway it was quite fun  to just glop paint around and see what emerged.  Can’t wait to do it again.

just messing around

Oh well back to the salt mines.