Painting castles & dragons and other ramblings...


Here's a few photos of the mural I'm working on in the medieval room, to sorta show the process. When painting something like this you work from background to foreground-- whatever is closest to you you paint last. The reasoning is, your lines are going to overlap some as you paint, so if one object is in front of another you of course want the lines of the nearer object to be on top. Trust me, you don't want to try to paint the background last around something in the foreground, you'll screw up the edges of the object. Been there, done that.

So anyway, here's some background scenery. Sky first, then trees, and lake. Here you see the grass is one flat color, I paint the predominant midtone color as a base first... in this case a bright green for the grass and brown road...





... and then I put in the details into the grass and dirt road. (Except in front of the wall, I have to paint the wall before finishing the grass that's in front of it) And, I have the base coat on the castle too.





Next, I have the details added to the castle, and starting the base coats on the dragon.




I'm following a picture that the owner printed off the Internet. We haven't figured out why the dragon seems to be giving the knight the "thumbs up" sign... or he might be flipping him the bird, I don't know.

The owner has had some sharp-looking business cards printed for me. And, so far I've had one person ask me about painting something on a motorcycle part for him and the owner's friend asked about painting something in her daughter's bedroom. Some business would be good, I need to get some money rolling in, faster than it's been rolling out.

So here I am starting this mural-painting stuff after all these years. A funny note about that- it's another case of "Mothers are ALWAYS right". Case in point- in 1992 I was at a crossroads, in the same week I was faced with two choices:

1. I had just started a new job selling vacuum cleaners that week
2. My mother said to me, "There's a class you should take on how to paint murals and then you can go around and paint murals for people."

At that time in my life I was very uninspired and didn't really have any confidence in doing anything with art. So, I chose to try to sell vacuums. And I sucked at it (pun intended.)

However, I will never say I made the wrong choice. If I look at all the events that happened after that, one lead into the other, and I doubt any of it would have transpired the way it did if I had taken the other road. It's like in the movie Mr Destiny... you can take one pivotal point in your life and say "What if that happened differently" and the outcome years later might be completely different.... but not necessarily better. I believe things happen the way they do for a reason. Call it fate or predetermined destiny or what you will, but a lot of things happened the way they did because I took the vacuum job. And I regret none of it.

So now that I've ventured down one fork in the road, it's finally time to travel the next. Mom may have been right about the mural thing... it just had to start at a delayed time.

Morphin' wimmen...

My painting instructor came across this YouTube video, "Women in Art". It takes famous paintings of women and gradually morphs them from one to the next, starting in the 1500s and running through contemporary times. It's interesting (to me anyway) to see the art movements change... Renaissance, neoclassicism, romanticism, modern. You can also play along, how many paintings can you name, or artists... Renoir, Degas, Matisse, Frida Kahlo...

Another unusual, and slightly creepy, effect is seeing the eyes move as it morphs from one to the next.

Something Hubby picked up on was how the expressions change, innocent to seductive and back again, etc. Okay, I have to give him credit for that one. Although I don't know if it's a product of his art class or psychology class...

Anyway, here's the video:

Oh, and happy belated Thankgiving to all. It was a nice relaxing day in our household (as I once again got out of having to go to relatives' houses!). I cooked another 23lb birdzilla, courtesy of Kroger who keeps giving me a free turkey every year. Our friend Jim came over again this year, and we loaded him up with half a bird to take home with him.

In all, not a bad day of food and football. Hope everyone else had a good one too!

Mural #2...

The second mural for Leapin' Lizards went a lot faster, it was a fairly simplistic beach scene. I couldn't get a pic of the whole thing because the room was too small (my cellphone camera can't zoom out, and I couldn't back up far enough!) So, here's a couple shots of different areas:

That wave at the bottom comes from the underwater scene around the corner of the wall. I needed some sort of transition from one scene to the other. But, the owner's kids looked at the beach and asked where the people are at, and Hubby said they're running from the tidal wave. Everyone's a critic.

Anyway, here's another part:

The mural I'm working on now is in another party room, it's the scene with the knight and dragon. It won't be finished quite as fast as the beach mural was... the knight is on a HORSE and lord knows I can't help but paint details on a horse! The whole rest of the mural might take about 6 working days but then the horse itself will take me another 5, haha. Everyone's telling me the knight's horse doesn't have to look like Secretariat. It's a sickness, I know...

DNA check...

I came across this article "23AndMe Will Decode Your DNA for $1,000. Welcome to the Age of Genomics" from Wired Magazine. I know I'm pretty far behind on DNA technology (okay truth be told I never read about DNA technology) so forgive me if I'm late to find out about companies doing this. But, I thought it was pretty interesting- for the pawltry fee of $1000 this company will scan your DNA, and more or less tell you what genes, traits and characteristics you inherited from your family. They also match it up with their database to let you know what diseases or conditions your genes make you a risk for. It also shows what risks you may pass on to your children.

But as quoted from the article, "This new age of genomics comes with great opportunity — but also great quandaries. In the genomic age, we will no longer have the problem of not knowing, but we will face the burden of whether we want to know in the first place."

My view is- Hell yeah I want to know! I'm the type that I want to know the bad news immediately, because I'd rather know than not know. "An ounce of prevention..." and all that jazz. My grandmother on my dad's side died from heart problems, and my mother has heart problems. I'm left assuming I'm going to have heart problems probably around my 60's-70's (and assuming I live that long). But if doctors were to know now while I'm, well, sorta young, what my genes show, then they would know how I should best start prevention of those problems.

And then there's Hubby's view- Hell NO I don't want to know! He already knows his body is falling apart from a bone disease, and knows doctors would tell him to stop drinking his beer, smoking, eating anything that tastes good... so he just doesn't want to know about it. To him knowing would be worse than not knowing. Which of course bums me out because I'd rather keep him around a little longer by knowing what other problems may rear their ugly heads, and what to do about it.

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting article of what's on the horizon for preventative medicine. But then it also goes into checking traits of children to know what their talents may be to create a sort-of "strategy" for their life, which I think is going a bit too far. Just because a kid's DNA may show he/she is predetermined to have musical talents doesn't mean the kid would enjoy playing the violin. And you know too many parents out there would do that.

But I told Hubby that if he were to go through the miracle-of-science-reversal to have a kid again, I can just hear him telling his boy "Your DNA shows you're going to be a Denver Broncos quarterback, so get your butt out there and practice!!!" hahaha

Happy Birthday Jaydee!

1931, my goodness... you seem as spry as a man 50 years younger as you run around the country visiting your friends! Enjoy your day. :P

Painting with the fishies...

Sunday I finished the first of several murals at the Leapin' Lizards place. Here's the whole wall...



And next here's a few detail pics where you can actually see the fish. By the way, in the original picture that I was copying this goldfish has teeth. Um, I decided it didn't need to be a mutant pirahna in my painting.

In this next section, this orange goldfish had big blue spots... we all thought it looked like it had measles so again I took "artistic freedom" to not include the spots.

Then here's the dolphins and turtle.

Now I'm starting to paint a beach scene on another wall in that same room. Next will be one of the other party rooms where I'll be painting a knight on his steed fighting a dragon, with a castle and a princess looking out the window waiting to be rescued. Luckily the rest of the murals should be less detailed than this scene was...

School painting too...

Besides spending all my free time painting murals, I've also finished another painting at school. This project was to do a "glaze" painting. Unfortunately you can't see the transparent quality to this artwork. In glazing you use a clear Liquin suspention that you add small amounts of color to. The Liquin causes the oil paint to dry quickly, and so you paint on one day, it dries, and then you paint another layer on the next day, ect. Each layer is semi-transparent, and so you gradually build up the color layer-by-layer. As stated by our instructor, "the light goes through the layers and is deflected like through sheets of glass."

Oh well, it's all lost in a crappy cellphone photo of it.

"Memories Racing By"

On this project we were to bring things from home to paint, hence the horseracing junk.

• I had one horseshoe that I just duplicated around the painting.
• The horse is one of my favorite childhood Breyer plastic horses (I had like 50 of them as a kid, and still have a box of about 25 in the attic).
• The boot I wore while walking hots at the track, averaging 10 miles a morning which is why there's a blowout on the side of the leather (and a permanent bunion that developed in the joint of my foot).
• The bale of hay I painted off memory.
• The saddle sheet was from the Stonerside Stakes at Lone Star, where working for Asmussen we had the filly Gilded Wings entered. I think she came in like 3rd or so in the race. In the bigger stakes races where they print the name of the horse onto the saddle sheet, afterwards the grooms like to keep their horses' sheets as momentos. But, occassionally us girls could coerce the groom in our broken Spanish to give the sheet to us, which was the case here. I have this one and one for Compendium in the Dallas Turf Handicap.

Anyway... enough boring ya'll. Besides painting murals and painting class, I had an essay to write for English class, poster & logos to create for Computer Illustration class... too much to do in too little time! Calgon take me away!

The weird and interesting...

For all you RSS feed reader junkies out there, here's a blog I've been enjoying lately: Dark Roasted Blend

Updated daily with "Weird and Unusual Things", such as:

Office pranks- it makes you wonder if these offices are still in business due to the incredible amounts of time it must have taken to pull some of these pranks off.

Stewardess uniforms from the 50's and 60's, including the hot pants and go-go boots of Southwest Airlines. Warlock you should enjoy that one!

Heavy Machinery Acrobats- Accidents with heavy cranes... stuck, broken, sunk, collapsing, you get the picture. A bunch of "what were they thinking?" photos.

Enjoy

Leapin' Lizards!...

While out working and visiting businesses, Hubby came across a "family entertainment center" being built out of an old indoor go-cart speedway. The woman who owns it is trying to keep her cost down and so she's doing everything herself to get it ready, including painting murals in several "party" rooms (and she has no painting experience herself). She's expecting to open in December and therefore is REALLY crunched on time, so Hubby worked out a deal with her that I will help her paint the murals and in exchange she will let me put some of my artwork on display.

In the room I'm working on right now, they were putting this ocean wallpaper scene on the wall. It was only halfway up, so I finished laying the wallpaper (Mom would be proud that I remembered how to do wallpaper!)

After that, I am now painting another wall in the room to match the underwater scene. Here's where I was getting started on the background:

And here's where I was at with it yesterday after about 4 days of working on it:

By the way, no I've never painted a mural before, this is my first one which is another reason I'm doing it for free. (FYI, muralist prices are often about $12 sq/ft from what I've seen.) But who knows, maybe some of the rich parents taking their kids to parties at this place will be interested in having murals painted in their homes, lol.

One more thing, the owner woman's husband came to the place the other day, and it turns out it's a guy I grew up with who lived two houses down from me all through school. I'll have to take our 2nd grade class photo to show her, hahaha. Boy it's a small world, isn't it? You never know where you're going to run into someone.

Ashley

1995 - 2007

We came home and she was jumping around from excitement, and then fell over and died, just like that. One minute she was dancing around, and a few minutes later we were burying her in the backyard.

At least she died happy.