Mosaic Project 2 the Vikinging

It is once again time for Benicia Artists Open Studios which is may 5th and 6th,  and this year they are doing the Mosaic Project again where they will be raffling off 144 little panels created by some artists in the community. Laura and I created panels for the exhibition. The tiles will be

Last year I made an octopus, this year after buying some art from Miss Monster of a viking berserker I was inspired to make my own viking. I decided to use this paint set that I have had for a really long time and it didn't go quiet as planned. I think I ended up with a cool little tile, but if I had it to do over again I would do a few things differently and use the paint in a different way. I need to try and paint more. Maybe a painting every 3 months.

Arts Benicia Mosaic Project

During the Open Studios (I also created the flier for the show) which was may 1st, (I finally got around to uploading the pictures) this year they did the Mosaic Project for the first time where they will be raffling off 144 little panels created by some artists in the community. Laura and I created panels for the exhibition.

144 tiles
It was a smash success and all of the tiles were sold. I have no idea who got my tile but I got a tile of one of the artist members whom I like very much.
My tile, The Octopus and the Skull
Laura's Tile, The Bunny Skull
It was a lot of fun and I am looking forward to doing it again next year.

August Munny

During the big 100 year sale at Blick I bought two Munny figures with the intent of making August and Gilda figures.
Here is the sketch I made on the August Munny with the little yellow pen that came in the box.

Front

Back

I had never thought about having a toy of something I have made, but now that I've made one, I would love to see some one mass produce one of my designs, that sounds like fun.
Preview for the Gilda Munny; she stills needs a lot of work. The pen that she came with was black and the sketch shows through the acrylic paint I've been using, so right now I'm in the process of sanding the ink off of her... albeit slowly. Soon she will have a different design closer to the sketch that I made for the two!

WAR HAMMER Ornament

At the opening for the small works show at Arts Benicia, where I had a couple of paintings for sale, one of the board members approached me about making a Christmas ornament for her stepson. She bought the one that I made last year and it was a big hit. This year I was asked to make it War Hammer themed. Now I am not supper into war hammer but I used to love going to the War Hammer store in the Metreon way back when, and looking at all of the models. It also just so happened that when I went into Comic Relief in Berkley that in their 50 cent comic bin I found a War Hammer 40,000 comic, where most of my reference for the piece came from. My quick internet search confirmed this so I went ahead and made it based off of War Hammer 40,000 hope that was what he likes.

On the bottom I put one of the Space Marine symbols, a skull with wings in gold!

I actually forgot to take snapshots when it was actually done. These were the most finished progress shots that I took. I added silhouetted warriors in the back ground to make it feel more epic. The pictures don't show it well, but between the emblem and the picture on top there is a silhouetted pile of corpses that they fight on.
This was a lot of fun I can't wait to make more next year, maybe some more for planning and I can get more then one done in a season.

Papa T

I was commissioned by my friend Pat's mother to do a portrait of her father as Mr.T, since he appears to have been obsessed B.A. Baracus from the A-Team. This was a birthday present for her daughter, who found it rather hilarious that her Papa was so obsessed with Mr.T. in the first place.

I sent these initial sketches to Nancy and asked which one she liked, and she said that they were all too awesome to pick. She told me to pick which ever one I thought would work best; the last one was my favorite so I went ahead with that drawing.

Pencils
At first I had started the drawing on another piece of paper that reacted poorly to water, it would just instantly buckle when I applied the watercolors. So I had to start over and as I drew in Papa T and I decided it needed something more. And what would be more appropriate than a giant explosion?
Ink
I had decided to add some bullet holes to the inked version to make it look like the A-Team logo. I also decided to carry this onto the matte and cut bullet holes into the matte and colored the insides with ink.
Paint
I wish my scanning bed was a little bigger it seems that everything I paint is just a little too big for the bed. I couldn't get a good scan but here is the general look. I had planned this painting to fit in this gold frame that I had in my possession for a while. I figured that a picture of Mr. T could be in nothing else.
Matte and frame
Originally on the matte I had painted the words "I pity the fool" in gold letters in a stencil font. However, I didn't take into account that the frame covered the matte so much and it cut off the bottom of the words. I didn't really know what to do about it, Laura suggested that I just paint the whole matte gold, which turned out awesome! I think Mister T would approve.
Nancy really liked it, Kelsey really liked it and they told me that Papa could recognize himself, so I count it a success.

Beeing Dead

This is the first Painting that I completed for the Bees at the Bee show on May 8th (Second Saturday) in the front court yard of the Sacramento Bee. You can find theme there for 200 dollars, half of that money will go to me and the other half will go to the "Honeybee Research Program" to help save the bees. The requirements were that the pieces were bee themed.
Both of the pieces I did were centered around bees and death of humans. These were a lot of fun to paint and got me back into painting outside of the computer. I need to do it more. Though the lack of an undo or layers is irritating, limits my experimentation, but I must say, there is more room for happy accidents this way.
Turning in the paintings today.
Save the bees!

Luchador Mask 01

Ryan Cicak, a friend of a friend, is working on a web series about a super hero and he asked me for some art that has to do with masks to populate the walls of the set.




















I love luchadors; they have a ridiculous mystique about them.Sso when a project about masks and super hero came up my first thought was to do a luchador mask. This is my first pass on this project, I missed the turn in point and I want to do something a little better if I'm going to turn it in late. I didn't really plan this one out when I started it so I think with more sketches and a little more planning I can make something much better. I need to think of better iconography to work with a luchador super hero.

I painted this this on a cigar box divider. My dad smokes cigars and has a lot of these; they are 7.5" by 7.5". I think they are a fun size and material to work with. I have another 10 or 15 of these so there will be more tiny paintings on cigar box dividers in the future.

Christmas Gifts

This Christmas I did several acrylic paintings as Christmas gifts, half of which I forgot to take pictures of, though some were small enough and flat enough that I could run them through my scanner. These are just a few I will post more when I am able to get pictures of them.
A while back laura showed me this artist who uses oil on wood and I really liked how that looked and the texture that wood gave to the paintings, not to mention how easy and cheap it is to find pieces of wood to paint on. Though I don't have any oil paintings, I don't have a work space with the ventilation to work with them, so I decided to use acrylics instead.






















I did this one for Laura.
I started this painting like 6 months ago for the longest time it was just a daruma on a piece of wood for Christmas I decided to finish the painting by adding Hungarian (since Laura's family is Hungarian) flower designs inspired by their traditional style of embroidery, Kalocsa. This seems to be something I have been doing combining Daruma's and western European culture, I hope it isn't too culturally insensitive of me, I just love the design of the Daruma as well as the cultural meaning. Surprisingly I think that the flowers and the daruma work well together and the Kalocsa was a fun style to work in.



















I did this one for Laura's mom
She is a former nurse and now a nutritional instructor at John F Kenedy University and when ever Laura and I come to her with a question about an ailment or a food question the answer is usually "try putting some coconut oil on it." She even fixed a a stuck lock by sticking coconut oil in the lock. So I wanted to make her a plaque that said just that. I looked at a lot of vintage signs as reference and came up with this design. On Laura's painting I would draw on the wood with a pencil which would dent the wood and aake it more difficult to put a smooth painting on it. I went to an art show last year and saw a show of Todd Schorr's work and they had a DVD on how he worked. One of the things that he did on his paintings was to take a drawing and cover the back with charcoal and then trace the drawing on to the canvas. I did the same thing here and it worked really well. Though I think in retrospect I would have painted the white on the board first. I really liked how the text came out. I showed this to Laura and she felt that the composition felt unbalanced and that I should add another coconut. I had wanted to avoid having two coconuts because I thought it would end up looking like balls (just sayin').
















Here is the final version with the extra coconut and the added palm frond. It was kind of rough around the edges but I really liked how this turned out, and so did Laura's mom.

Christmas Ornaments

This week I painted two Christmas Ornaments for Arts Benicia. This was designed as a fund raiser for Arts Benicia, where the artist members were invited to come and get a blank ornament and decorate it to be sold for their gallery and education programs.





















Here is the first one, a Daruma Santa, or more a blue eyed whited haired Daruma. I figured with this one I would try and be more commercial with a Santa-esque figure. Though I don't know if appropriating a Daruma for Christmas was the most socially sensitive thing to do, I liked the idea and the colors are similar to Santa.
My second idea was going to be for me and for fun. For my second ornament I decided to do a skull and tentacles. After I told Laura what it was she told me she hoped it didn't sell so that she could have it for herself, no such luck.





















Here it is half way through painting it.





















Here I am painting the tentacles on the skull in the Arts Benicia gallery.





















A close up of me painting a tentacle.





















Here are my ornaments on the tree during the Holiday Parlor Tour. I volunteered to help out Arts Benicia and their very talented program coordinator to set up the room, which involved me helping to carry lots of heavy things up a flight of stairs. The event wasn't much of a sucess, where as we didn't sell too many ornaments, just three. One was mine! I sold the skull one the day before the event to one of the Arts Benicia board member who loved it.

Mario Pumpkin Painting (PART I)

Last year I painted a portrait on a pumpkin and it sparked my new interest I have with acrylic painting. I like the idea of painting things on non traditional canvases and things that are temporary. It is also more fun to paint a pumpkin as apposed to gutting it and carving it, though I don't get any kick ass roasted pumpkin seeds so there is a trade off.

A while ago Laura and I went to the San Jose Art Museum to see a show about Robots (which had some great pieces but we both thought it wasn't laid out that well in the space the museum had). When we were there we went to the gift shop we found this book "I Am 8-Bit" (which Jason is borrowing at the moment, i wonder if he knows he still has it?) which was filled with fine art based off of old arcade and Nintendo games which Laura and I found to be really fascinating, and sparked an interest in me to create my own video game based art work.

So I painted Mario and a boo on the pumpkin figuring it seemed more Halloweeny then simply having Mario on the pumpkin alone.





































































If I can find the time i want to paint Princess Peach with a Boo looking up her skirt on the other side.

Pat Memorial Pumpkin (Funeral Fun)

This is one I should have posted back in October, but back then I was still trying to post things in some kind of in chronological order (oh what an exercise in futility and counterproductive that turned out to be), so I’m posting it now. This is piece is something that I did for my friend Patrick "Pathetic" Herrmann’s funeral service that was held in October. His mother asked that people who attended the service to bring pumpkins because they were one of Pat's favorite things, and to feel free to carve or write messages on them for the funeral.




















I drew this sketch of what I want to do on pat's memorial pumpkin. I wanted the drawing to have a tattoo feel to it, so I added scroll with text and roses. I wanted his artist name and the name he claimed to have legally changed it to (though I never saw any documentation to verify that) PATHETIC in a scroll banner like one would might find in a memorial tattoo. I was going to do his favorite flower, because knowing Pat he would have one, but I didn't recall what it was so instead I picked the rose because it is an element that you often see in tattoos. I did a portrait of him they way I always drew him, and I added his character Stupid Ugly baby as both an angel and as a little devil. I wanted to add some silhouette skulls and fill stuff to make it look nice and fancy (because, as you know, silhouettes are quite fancy). I also had planned to put a pumpkin on the pumpkin, because it is totally something that I would do and Pat would make fun of me for, which I knew he would appreciate.























Here is an illustration that I did of Pat's character Stupid Ugly baby. He is a charming back alley aborted fetus who survived and lives in a bucket.


So my dad hearing this went out to the country early on Saturday morning the day before the funeral and got the biggest pumpkin he could find, easily a foot and half tall and two feet wide. First I tried working on the pumpkin with sharpies, but those didn’t work too well; they wouldn't stick and ended up looking faded and was too much work to get anything that looked half decent with them. So my dad offered to let me use his acrylic paints, which worked really well. But he didn't have too many, just a basic acrylic set that you get in an art box which comes with really bad brushes. So my and I went to a local art store, bought some more paint and some nice brushes and went home to start painting the pumpkin.

























This is how it turned out. I changed the design from the original sketch because I wanted it to look more like Pat, and also some of the other elements changed because of the amount of time I had to work on it. I added a hat because he wore those trucker caps often and I couldn't pick just one of his many haircuts. So I gave him a hat and wrote “Fuck” on it because I always draw him with a shirt with “Fuck” scrawled across it, but without the body for a shirt I had to add it to the hat. Which my mom didn't care for and made sure I had a thing to cover it up with incase it offended any one, but I knew it wouldn't because it was totally Pat. I didn't add the devil stupid ugly baby on the bottom and the pumpkin on the bottom because it wouldn’t have been very visible or recognizable, so I added Rest In Peace at the bottom instead. I made the devil and the baby angel on the top because I didn't have time to add a bunch of Stupid Ugly Babies on there and also I wanted it so you could see everything from one angle, so I placed them both near his head. I added BFF and BFAM on the top of the pumpkin which is what me and Pat were, Best Friends Forever and Brothers From Another Mother (respectively). These were also the inscriptions that we had engraved on our friendship rings (that Laura referred to me as Pat’s “manwife” for. I now wear his on my pinky).

The best part about this project was that when people walked into the church and saw that pumpkin they knew who painted it. Pat's mom and ex-girlfriend both said "I can tell that Eric is here," just by seeing my pumpkin, which was a very sweet moment for me.

The Pumpkin now resides with Pat's mom and is holding up despite the fact that it’s six months later. The most miraculous thing is that it has no signs of rotting whatsoever. Leading some of us to believe that Pat is still around, inhabiting this pumpkin and making sure that it sticks around.