Old Artwork: The car-wash bucket

The other day, the utility sink in the garage overflowed mightily during a load of laundry. The ensuing flood caused us to quickly remove everything from the garage floor and take it out to the back patio. Now, as we take our time to go through everything and organize it, (and hopefully get rid of a lot of it,) we are finding stuff that we haven't really looked at in a long time.

Take for example this bucket. Given to Jerry, most likely on some long-ago Fathers Day, it is a comic, probably the only one I ever made of our whole family. It was drawn with Sharpie marker on a white utility bucket. The words on the first two panels must have been written in some other kind of pen, because they faded away years ago. I have digitally added the missing lines, or a reasonable approximation.

Black and White

For Illustration Friday

Desert Rhapsodies
Original sketchbook cover from 1974. Based on a view of Zabriskie Point in Death Valley.




A new, digitially created version of Desert Rhapsodies.




For reference: a photo of Zabriskie Point. Desert Rhapsodies gets its name from Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, which we listened to on our 8-track player in our new Chrysler on our first ever trip through Death Valley. I was 12. The music and the valley are now forever linked for me.

Whimsical mushroom house

I have painted lots of plastercraft things over the years. This is one of my favorites. I have been planning to post a series of pictures of my painted plastercraft items, but for now I'm just doing this one because I want it online to show to someone. Because I'm hoping I can find another one.

Plastercraft painted with acrylics. About 10 years ago.

Summer

For Illustration Friday


For me, summer wouldn't be complete without watching a fireworks show on the 4th of July.


And...



With our internet not functioning for most of the day, I worked on this Summer painting! I used Art Rage for both pictures, and for the first time never used a pencil and paper. Now this is an art software I can understand!

New (photo) art: Inspired by cabbage!

So there I was, slicing cabbage for a recipe this morning, when I became distracted by all the squiggly lines inside it. Okay, this is something I sort of know how to do. I manipulated one shot in several different ways in Photoshop.

The cabbage




Interesting cabbage residue




Original photo




Electrified neon cabbage.




"Threshold"




I really like this one. Very un-cabbage like. Paper cut-out and color manipulation.

Oh, and the recipe turned out good, too!

Digital

For Illustration Friday

Back when I was a young artiste, I used to fantasize about a computerized "Art Machine." It could manipulate shapes and colors, lines and textures, and make anything you wanted. Of course, it was big enough to fill a room, and in my fantasy I had a staff to make it work, because I really didn't know anything about computers. Oh, and to get the image perfectly from your brain to the screen, the machine hooked right up to your brain.

Fast forward to the present. I finally have my art machine, and it does just about everything I imagined back in the 70's. It's small enough to sit on my kitchen desk, between my coupon holder and the dog's medicine. Unfortunately, it doesn't plug directly into my brain, and learning how to make all the art stuff work the way I want it to is frustrating. (I have a low tolerance for frustration.) But I'll submit my scratchy little picture anyway and hope to do better next time.

Old Artwork: The lost Eureka sketches

After I posted those other Eureka pictures, I found these two under the bed!!



This is the sketch I made for the cliffhanger painting. I don't even remember doing a sketch for this. (Well, it was over 30 years ago.)






Paradise lost. The jar never really broke. I was only illustrating the breakdown of my relationship with you-know-who.