Monster Frames!

I painted a whole mess of these Ghouls-in-the-Dark last Fall; sold a couple, gave more away to fellow Monster fans as gifts. The BYU Illustrators' Association is taking part in a Monster themed show at Muse Music here in Provo starting this Friday, and I want a bite of the pie, so I thought I'd enter the Caveman and Screamin Skull. They needed to be framed and hang-able, so I built frames today in the Scene Shop with leftover Masonite. I went through a series of ideas for the paint, from velvet facing to flat black, but I decided on the charred blood scheme. I wanted to evoke the tacky-flashiness of the old 60's comic book ad rubber masks. The show opens this Friday night (Feb. 1st) at Muse in Provo. I'll have these two and some hand colored prints of my Runaway Honda design for sale. GO BUY ALL OF THEM. I plan of building some more of these ooze frames too, so let me know if you want one. 

Sunday Head Paintings #3 Rondo

This week's Sunday Head Painting is of everybody's favorite Creeper, Rondo Hatton. He acted in a few suspense movies for Universal in the 30's, but most of you looking at this would probably recognize his likeness from the Rocketeer. When Dave Stevens drew the Rocketeer comic, he made one of the villains Rondo, just like he made himself the Rocketeer  and Betty Page his girlfriend. When the movie was made in the early 90's, the character was recreated by making up another actor to look like the long-dead Rondo. So if you remember the "Where is the rockeht?!" scene from the Rocketeer film, you've sort of seen Rondo Hatton. Acromegaly, the same disorder that made Andre the Giant giant, is what gave the originally smooth featured Rondo his garish looks. Anyway, here's the painting. It's the smallest of the three Sunday Heads so far, which was a mistake, because it used the largest and by far most craggy and detail-laden of the three heads as reference. The actual size of the painting is about that of a HotWheels car. I'm still pretty happy with it as an hour acrylic sketch. Tune in next week for the next exciting installment.

Sunday Head Paintings- #2: Shaky

The inspiration for today's Sunday Head Painting comes from the vaults: a photo of my good pal, fellow artist and Deadly Venoms brother Shaky Sullivan wearing welding goggles as sunglasses on the Bonneville Salt Flats 4 or so years ago. I saw the picture a couple of years back, and always wanted to do a painting of it. I experimented with color quite a bit on this one, and I think I like how it turned out alright. It's tough to do all of the color calculations in one's head in an hour long paint sketch, but hopefully it will help out on more involved paintings. Anyway, here's FrankenShaky, tune in next week for another Sunday Head Painting.

Sunday Head Painting #1

I'm pretty out of practice with painting. I've been trying to develop my ink skills more over the last several months, but I got to missing painting too much. Due to this, a real need for practice, and having dropped Bob Barrett's head painting class this week due to scheduling conflicts, I decided to start doing an hour long head study every Sunday afternoon. Here's the first one, a little (4"x6"-ish) gouache portrait of my lovely Lady Friend, Ang. I worked from a photo I took of her a month or two ago specifically to use for painting practice. I'm definitely rusty (I wasn't any Leyendecker to start with), but I'm happy with this first try in months. It's tough to get a face down in paint in an hour. I'm also in Chris Thornock's acrylic illustration class this semester which should get me readjusted to using color and value like this. Check in Sundays for more! I'll use a better camera in the future.