Update Long Overdue

It's been almost five months since my last post, and a crazy five months it's been.  A great deal has changed for me during that time in both my personal and professional lives, some good and some not so good, but all taking a lot of my time.  I've still made time for several projects, but I've failed to keep up with this blog and post about my progress.  So...this one will be quite lengthy, and I'm going to try to post more regularly over the next few months.

First, here are the pics of the finished canvas for Anijha, the daughter of my son's first caretaker at his daycare.  The look and design of this painting is very simple, but it took forever.  She had requested as many neon colors as possible; the problem arose when I discovered neon acrylic paint is very thin.  It's akin to painting with water with a little food coloring added.  Everything on that canvas took from 30-50 coats to give it a solid, even appearance (even then a few spots were lacking for my taste).

I've also continued working on the series of three canvases I'm painting for my son with his full name on them.  I finished his middle name, Langston, first and posted those pics last spring.  I also posted the next canvas of his first name, Joseph, last spring during it's drawing phase.  This summer I nearly finished painting it.  I've got a few characters to finish and then some touching up to do on the white background, where you can still see some of the rough pencil lines.  This canvas uses all Hanna-Barbera characters.

After finishing Anijha's canvas posted above, I was left feeling somewhat dissatisfied with the end result.  I was most unhappy with the way the neon paints had worked out, but I was also a little disappointed with the design I had settled on.  When I took on the commission for her and her brother's canvases, her brother's design popped right into my head, and I was happy with it from beginning to end.  But Anijha's always seemed a little forced to me.  I felt some pressure to get come up with something fast and get it finished.  Even still, it took me about 2 1/2 months to complete them both just because I was so busy with teaching and my family.  But because of that dissatisfaction and because I had also gotten the urge to start working with watercolors again, I took another stab at the design.  It's almost finished, as well.  When it is finished, I'll give it to her for free to do what she wants with it.  I feel I owe her a better design, and it gives me a chances to practice with watercolors again.  The first pic below is the sketch that I colored with prismacolors to test some color choices.  The second pic is the actual watercolor in progress.

Speaking of watercolors, I've started drawing some characters from the show Tiny Toons which was a huge hit during the '90s and one of my favorite afternoon cartoons when I was younger.  I've drawn and inked them on watercolor paper.  I'm planning to paint them with watercolors and cut them out.  I'm not exactly sure what I'll do with them from there, but I'll figure something out.

In this next painting, I'm actually using oils.  I don't use oils very often because they take so long to dry, but I love the look they create on canvas.  It's a painting of the character Huey from the comic strip and, now, cartoon series The Boondocks.  I've been a huge fan of the comic strip for years and love season one of the show.  I've just not gotten around to watching the other seasons; I can't imagine their bad, though.  Animator LeSean Thomas is largely responsible for it, and his stuff is always amazing.  Using oil paints gives even a cartoon character a certain look of sophistication.  It needs a little touching up before going up on a wall somewhere in my house.

Below is the rough pencil sketch of a tattoo design for friend of mine.  She asked me to design one involving a runner some time ago that never quite worked out, which is probably a good thing since she completely changed her mind about what she wanted.  The new design involves several references to Shel Silverstein's books and poems with significant numbers and letters pertaining to her immediate family worked in (some hidden and not-so-hidden in the branches and roots).  She's very happy with this design, so now I need to scale it down and make it a nice, crisp black ink drawing.  From there, it's up to some tattoo artist to finish the job; that's not part of my expertise.

And finally, I've decided to design a t-shirt for my classes this year.  This is something I've thought about before but never followed through with.  Through a random set of events, the running icon for the class is zombies.  We've made some loose, corny connection between lusting for brains and lusting for intelligence, but pretty much zombies are just kind of cool right now, so we're going with it.  The front of the shirt will have a sort of crest in the top left-hand side of the shirt involving Wilkins's Pre-AP Scholars.  The back will have a large cartoon zombie head surrounded by the words "Taking over the world one SOAPSTone at a time."  It's completely pompous and full of inside jokes, but the students are really excited about it.  And I want them to feel like it's special to be in my class.  I'm not sure what the colors will actually be on the shirt, probably way different from what I mocked up, but I'm happy with the overall design regardless.

Hopefully, I'll post again soon with some final versions of most of what I've shown you this time and have some new stuff in process, as well.