An Island Where No One Lives

At times, when it’s rainy and drizzly around here, I like to take my trusty (and ultraswell) D70 up on the Blue Ridge Parkway, and go above the clouds, and take pictures.

Since I’m a nice guy and all, I thought I’d share some highlights. Click on any of these to open in a new window (they’re around 80-100K or so).

Earth continues to amaze me.

Let’s hope he’s just taking a break…he probably needs one–

Some more work with clouds, and I’m pretty happy with them. I also cleared some space on the wall to line the two works up.

Speaking of things lining up, I placed a work beneath another work, and look how the damn things line up:

Weird. Many, many times I wonder what it is I’m doing. Also, if I’m the one actually doing it, or if I’m just some agent for some big, creepy artwork floating out there in the Great Beyond.

This one needs an introduction. However, it’s not going to get one. I don’t have the images to make such an introduction make sense. It would be kind of like, “Okay, imagine now that these things happened, and then some other stuff happened, and further down the road it came to fruition, then stopped.” And I think that would be hard to grasp. I’m not sure I understand it myself. I may just be typing without reason. (”Typing without Reason.” There’s a good title for a blog.)

So: part one and part two, below. Enjoy!

That one was when there was still a lot of white space on the canvas, and I thought I ought to document such a state.

Next, we’ve removed more of the white space.

Yeah, it’s a bright blue sky. That’s the first part.

Next…will be posted next week. Maybe. Probably. Could be.

Striker can be quite cute, especially when he thinks I have something that he really ought to have instead, like cheese. Whenever I photograph him, though, he goes into full-blown goof mode and I get some very silly images.

So I thought I’d do an end-run around that and show you some of his feet.

I think you should admit defeat.

I’ve done some extensive work on Paint Blog II, without adding a single brushful of paint to the canvas. How is this possible? Normally, I wouldn’t give away such a valuable secret, but since that’s the whole point of this episode, I guess I will.

First of all, speaking of brushfuls of paint, here’s a new brush:

I’ve been needing some large style brushes for a while (usually I use my hands) and A.C. Moore has some very good and very inexpensive ones.

Anyway, how can I radically alter Paint Blog II without adding any paint? Simple. Turn it into one half of a diptych (the fancy term for a work comprising two paintings).

Why, it’s so simple, a child could have thought of it! But he or she didn’t, I did. So the first thing I did was to put some blue and white on a canvas. Unfortunately, I used the wrong shade of blue (one that is slightly warmer than the shade on Paint Blog II), so I had to do that over.

What I did was put paint directly on the canvas in little blobs that look like slugs. Viz:

This then gets all spread around and mushed around and generally is forced to cover most of the canvas. (Note: Despite the rather purplish appearance of the photos to follow, they’re not actually purplish. I think it was the lighting in the room.)

This results in a huge thick mass of paint on the canvas, which, I can tell you from experience, is very hard to work with. We have to get the excess paint out of there. And here’s how.

Many canvases come with these little bits of wood or plastic that, I think, is supposed to keep them from warping or something. They never have any instructions, but they’re always there. Here’s one of them.

This will be used in conjunction with a space-age plastical drinking cup, like the one below.

Actually, the one pictured above was the very same one used in this operation.

What we do, is use the little wooden bit and scrape it across the canvas, gathering up the excess paint, and we then scrape the wooden bit across the lip of the cup, and repeat the process. At the end, the canvas looks like this:

And the cup looks like this:

The little wooden bit doesn’t get an “after” photo as it would have been too messy to try and hold it and photograph it. Trust me, though, it gave its life dearly, but in a good cause.

The canvas gets some more work:

And some more work. Below, we’ve started smoothing out the remaining paint so it doesn’t look like a bunch of scraped paint.

Finally (for now), we add some cloud details, trying to match the left edge with the right side of the original Paint Blog II.

This is a not-very-good photo of the two of them together. While it looks as if the color is way off between the two, trust me, it’s not the case. They actually look pretty good together.

Now, we’re going to let it dry some more and put some details in the clouds. Then, we start on continuing the structures on Paint Blog II over this new canvas.

Details as they appear.

Paint Blog II has an exciting new development!

Also, Paint Blog 4: In Space!

See you tomorrow.

Gentlemen…behold!

Paint Blog III is finished! Mwa ha ha ha ha!

Here’s photographic proof:

Here’s another photograph, which might be more accurate, color-wise! I’m so insane I can’t tell any more!

I am one canvas short of a gallery! Mwa ha ha ha ha!

Paint Blog 3’s background vexed me for a while, by which I mean the area on the right where there’s a kind of loop.

Here’s what I tried at first:

Argh, argh, argh! That’s just all wrong. I tried to darken it a bit, to make it a bit less distracting.

This isn’t much better, though I can be a bit more calm about it. And I can see where I can work with it a bit.

I tried using some faintly milky bands, like splitting skin, but it never worked right and even worse, I didn’t photograph it. I ended up instead turning the bands into overlapping tubes.

And then I darkened that up quite a bit.

Then the area to the left of that, underneath that little hanging fist or whatever it is (a uvula), started to bother me. It was too different from the rest, so I worked with that a bit, trying to make it blend. I think I got something. But not today.

Stay tuned tomorrow for the exciting conclusion!

Well, I posted less than I wanted to this week. I’ve got some ideas for some longer entries, which I know causes thrills to generate uncontrollably, but I haven’t done anything other than write some notes. Also, PaintBlog III is I think finished, but I want to coordinate the pictures a bit better than hurling them up at 6:00PM on a Friday.

So, weekend stuff. Why, that’s when no one reads these things! It’s sure-fire! Mwa ha ha ha!