And the work continues…

After some sanding the mask is given a nice even coat of grey primer.

Then the fun part, painting with acrylics,  something that I’ve been experimenting with more and more lately so its nice to get a chance to just go a little crazy.  I decided to go for more festive instead of dullish realistic colors.

After a bit more touch up and drybrushing workI grabbed some black ribbon and ran it through the holes and tried to figure out a way that would let me put it on myself, since holding the mask and tying 2 bows on the back of my head turned out to be… problematic.   I wound up just holding the mask in place and pulling all the ribbons tight and then taking it off and tying all 4 ribbons together a little closer in than I had been holding it.  This gave me a nice knot that i can grab on the back of my head and slide down to snap everything in place.  It actually feels quite comfortable, surprising considering its weight.  But it pulls tight against the forehead and rests on the frame of my glasses evenly.

Next up I got a small childrens black T-shirt and cut it in half and glued it to the bottom lining of the mask.Rinse and repeat for the other half of the shirt on the top part of the mask.

Put it together with a black shirt and the hooded robe and you get something like this. (Yeah its blurry I’ll get a better shot tomorrow) The glue still needs to cure and the fumes were burning my eyes a bit.

Soo it’s been a fairly productive beginning of November.  I’ve got the version 1.0 of the new http://www.beautifulbasics.com up and running.  Still need to put up some instructions etc etc.  But the core functionality is there and it works fine.

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.

Spent the weekend playing around with acrylics with Wendy.

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..

Got a good couple hours in last night.  I was originally just going to put in the base colors for the earth and grass and block out the buildings… buuut.. I simply had to paint something instead of just filling in boring flat blocks of color.

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