Oh Alizarine, my poor blog, I owe you about a day's worth of writing. Lately most of my creative energy has been funneled into my YouTube channel and just plain painting. I haven't forgotten about you. I will try to catch up this weekend!
Today's big news, as you can see, is that I've done another painting of Bunny. We recently celebrated our 12th Bunniversary (the day she decided she didn't want to be a stray kitten anymore and thought she'd team up with me) on Columbus Day.
Bun's having a pretty good autumn. I continue to take her on supervised walkabouts around the house, and her latest obsession is mole hunting. A few days ago I drew this on our kitchen chalkboard:
(She caught three and scared the hell out of one.)
This new painting was a quickie: I painted the background and basket on Tuesday and Bun on Wednesday. Fur takes a lot less time to paint than skin or petals or shiny stuff or just about anything else, apparently. You can watch me speed paint Bun on my new video, available here.
Are you subscribing to my channel yet? Please do. YouTube gives me, like, a shiny new penny for every subscriber I get. (I'm not sure how much money I make that way, actually. I do know that it's chump change, but chump change adds up.)
Want me to paint a pet of yours in a similarly cute way? Facebook me. Tweet at me. Let me know!
Last night Jeff and I took a walk and talked about future video ideas. I've been wanting to paint some Breaking Bad fan art for years, and in honor of the upcoming series finale, we felt that the time was right. Plus we could turn it into a video! I could not have been more excited about this.
Once home, I found a great shot of Walt and Jesse from the series of season 5 promotional photos on AMC's website.
In the photo, Walt (Bryan Cranston) is in the foreground and Jesse (Aaron Paul) is farther away from the camera. I wanted to put them on equal footing in my painting, so I made Jesse a bit larger and moved him closer to Mr. White. I taped a piece of 11"x14" watercolor paper to a board, painted it acid green, and let it dry overnight.
This morning, after Jeff had some trouble arranging my new painting setup, I started painting Walt with black watercolor. This is one of my favorite ways to paint: black watercolor on a toned or
stained sheet of paper, heightened with white. It's an old-school way
to work, and while this is more of a dry media project (charcoal,
pastel, pencil), I love it with watercolor and do it all the time. Walter White's face features a fascinating network of wrinkles, especially around his eyes and forehead. It took about an hour for me to finish his face before I moved over to Jesse.
(This is a black and white version of the original green painting.)
Jesse went a little faster than Walt--fewer wrinkles, no glasses--but that beard of his was a real speed bump. I think one of his top distinguishing characteristics is that crease that creeps from his left eyebrow toward the center of his face. If you hide it with your finger, Jesse looks like he admires Walt. Remove your finger, and Jesse's dubious.
As is the case with most of my videos, I painted this at breakneck speed (for me), and I finished it in about three hours. To produce a video with a manageable viewing time, Jeff sped up that boatload of video 32 times. So my hand is just whipping around in this one (check out my white nails--get it?). The video contains no narration and is more about entertainment and fan geekery than education, but at the same time I think it's always helpful to simply watch someone work. If I get requests to slow it down, we might put together a longer version with narration.
So here it is! I hope you're a fan of Breaking Bad at this point. I can't tell you how much time Jeff and I devote to discussing the show and how much brain space it occupies, especially now.
A friend commissioned me to paint some pink roses to give as a gift later this year. Jeff and I were lucky enough to be in Portland, Oregon for his birthday last month, and the city has an amazing rose test garden.
It boasts a mind-boggling array of roses in every color and variety imaginable, and I was able to take dozens of photos--fodder for future paintings and for use the next time somebody wants me to paint them. And needless to say, this place smelled incredible.
Just row after row of roses like these!
I sent my client a selection of photos of pink roses, and she chose one for me to paint the one: a cluster of light peachy-pink English roses that I wanted to make slightly pinker. I set to work and completed about a third of the 11"x14" painting in that first day.
And it was nice to have the tough rose out of the way (or at least started). The next morning I worked on the other roses.
And in the afternoon and the next morning, I developed the background.
This left a gaping white hole in the picture that I was saving for last. This rose was just starting to open, and I thought it would be a good subject for a video. You can see me paint it here (sped up eight times, I believe):
I'm not appearing in the video this time around--I don't think I need to show my face in all of them--and to make life a little easier for Jeff (who edits these), I changed the way I do my narrations. For my other videos, I recorded about 25 little chunks of audio, each about two sentences long, and we painstakingly dropped them into the videos at just the right time. This process was tiresome, and I thought it would be a lot easier if I did maybe four long chunks. And it was. I hope people like this approach just as much, as it saves us from an hour or two of moving mini audio files around.
I'd like to thank my sister for collaborating with me and linking to my last video about a week ago, by the way, and her thousands of viewers who stopped by to take a look at it. That was truly amazing, and I hope they come back for this one! And thanks to my dozens of readers in this tiny corner of the Internet for your support over the years.
If you'd like to continue to support me, please consider buying a print of this or my other paintings, available here. Feel free to contact me via a comment, email, Tweet, or Facebook message if you'd like me to paint some roses or other flowers for you as well! Next time I'll put up a post about what kind of flowers are available.
Here are some of the roses I sent to my client--I have lots of other rose colors, too.
I also have a PayPal button on the right side of my blog for those of you who'd like to support the cause financially. Please know that it always makes my day whenever somebody notices that and sends me some money--I typically shriek and go bounding around the room, upsetting the cats, before I send a gushing email thanking you. And if you've got nothing better to do, go to my YouTube channel and watch some videos, give 'em a thumbs-up, and comment. Believe it or not, that helps!
Brand new on my YouTube channel: it's another speed-painting video of my sister Emily, a.k.a. Poof! Three years ago, I painted this portrait of her:
And just for fun, Jeff and I attempted to make a video of me painting her face for about an hour. Our technology was not that great: my workspace is small, and the only way we could get a camera in there and have any kind of light was to position it sideways. There were focus problems at the beginning. But, whatever, we sped up the video, popped it up on my mostly-unused YouTube channel, showed it to friends, and let it sit there for three years.
And that crazy thing proceeded to accummulate almost half a million views!
I liked the small amount of ad revenue that started to trickle in (don't get too excited; this makes me a dollar a day at the very most), but I felt bad that the quality of the video was barely acceptable.
Three years later, Jeff and I have rebooted the channel, named it Art Food Kitty, and improved the technology--as inexpensively as humanly possible, with lots of MacGuyver stuff going on. After warming up with some how-to videos (see my last few posts), I'm finally ready to post a new Poof video: Emily 2.0!
This is a collaboration with Emily's Beauty Broadcast channel--and I'm so glad she wanted to do this because, um, she's basically a YouTube superstar. She's been a big help in the development of my channel, too. We've been talking about it a lot since I had the idea to create Art Food Kitty earlier this year, and we thought it would be great to introduce her fans to my channel via a collaboration.
So here is my speed-painting video of a quick portrait I made of Poof last week. She came up with a speed-makeup video, and I painted her based on some selfies she took immediately after she shot her video.
As I mentioned in the video, this has been sped up ten times, and it is also me painting at my absolute fastest. Most portraits like this take me a day to a day and a half to complete. The reason I hurried to complete it in a couple of hours was simple: our camera can only store so much video, and I didn't want to make a 30-minute video or speed it up to the point where my hand became an absolute blur. So two hours was about my limit.
And here is Emily's speed makeup video!
By the way, that thing I'm doing with my mouth at the beginning of my video? I don't
know what that is, I find it impossible to control, and I'm working on
it. I assume this is just the way I talk either all the time (I hope
not!) or when I am nervous (please?). If you don't know what I'm talking about, please disregard this and don't go back up there looking for it.
I've never felt comfortable
on camera, ever, and that was one reason why I've shied away from
YouTube all these years. People massacre my sister in comments and
on message boards on a regular basis, and she's so much more capable
than I am. Poof does her best to learn from constructive criticism and ignore abuse, but she's been making videos for almost eight years, and every once in a while someone will say something that will get to her. She's a human being! It's simply an occupational hazard at this point, and I'll have to get used to it, too. So far people have been very nice to me on YouTube, and that's terrific, but it's not going to last.
So yeah, you guys, I get it: my mouth does that sideways thing, I am very pale, I am old, my clothes are not interesting, my hair is black and I don't do anything cool with it, my makeup is always the same, I have several moles on my arms, my voice is weird and I talk like some kind of stoner robot, my palette is a mess, I am a crazy cat lady, I'm not a size 0, my paintbrushes suck, I don't have children and what's that all about?, I like to bake things that are not good for me, my fingernail polish is wrong in some way, my paintings are too realistic, my paintings are not realistic enough, I'm taking all the joy out of watercolor, I'm obviously just trying to make a buck, I'm a lousy teacher, I have no business being on YouTube, and I'm not uploading mockable new content quickly enough.
WAY AHEAD OF YOU!
Sorry. I'm nervous. I just checked my mouth and it's doing that sideways thing. So yeah. Please try to enjoy these videos by my sister and me. Please subscribe to my channel. I'll be in my safe room.
I took a YouTube break last weekend to deal with my art show, so Jeff and I didn't make a video then, but we're back with a new one today. This video focuses on hair and ears. I searched the internet off and on for a few days before I found an ear and hair combination that had it all: an entire ear not obscured by hair, blonde hair with highlights (it's the hardest color to paint), and big enough to see details. You'd be surprised by how difficult that was. I landed on an image of someone I think might be famous, but I didn't recongnize her.
The video has been sped up about eight times, and in a couple of boring spots it was sped up sixteen times. I've had one or two requests from people wanting to see this series in real-time, but honestly I don't know anyone who could handle 90+ minutes of me painting part of a head except for me. As it was, I felt like I painted this as fast as I possibly could and kept it under ten minutes long. Hopefully it's both educational and entertaining.
At the end, you can watch our cat Quixote feel me up for a couple of seconds, so please look forward to that one.
Those of you who really, really, really like ears and hair can find prints of this painting here!
Thanks for watching, and please share this with anyone you think might be interested. :)
My latest video is here! Continuing my series of facial features, I've turned my attention to noses, and this nose belongs to a famous person. In the video I invited viewers to guess who he is, but if you're familiar with me at all, the answer is not too surprising.
At the end of the video you'll see Bun doing a cute little flippy thing.
So yes, this is Bono. I used a reference photo from a couple of years ago--it's small and was taken by a fan or paparazzi--and I couldn't for the life of me find any information about it (if anyone knows, please tell me!).
I liked the light on his face here, and I needed his glasses to be such that I could paint his entire nose first before adding them, something that doesn't happen as often as you might imagine. Then I cropped the photo so that all I'd be painting was most of his face, and after a couple of hours of painting, this is what I came up with.
You can find prints of this and other U2 paintings here!
And in case you're new to this blog and my particular brand of insanity, here is where you can find those U2 comics I've been talking about. I've been a contributor to @U2 since 2002.
As promised/threatened, I've put together another facial features tutorial. This one deals with a mouth, obviously, and it's mine. Wanting to paint glossy, slightly parted bright lips, I contacted Tyler and Natalie earlier this week to see if they had any just lying around. They didn't--strangely, all of their female photography subjects seem to opt for matte or nude lips. And I didn't want to bother my sister, who is the queen of the bright, glossy lip. She's already done so much for me regarding the start-up of this YouTube channel, and anyway I have big plans for her later on in this series.
But I have a camera, and I've been told that I have a pretty mouth once or twice.
I put on the lipstick color that is currently defining my summer (Estee Lauder's All-Day Lipstick in Rich and Rosy). Surrounded by three skeptical cats and feeling incredibly stupid, I took a bunch of mouth-selfies by the living room windows. After a few dozen attempts, I settled on the one photo that didn't make me look like a complete mouth-breather and set to work painting it the next day.
This painting was a bit smaller than last week's eye and only took 90 minutes to paint, including a bit of drying time. Taking the advice of Poof and a couple of other people, I broke down and made an actual appearance with my face and everything at the beginning (please note the squirrel outside my window), and I recorded an audio narration to accompany the video. Therefore you will hear my voice in this one. You will hear my voice a whole lot. And let's see a show of hands: how many people are creeped out by the sound of their recorded voices?
ALL OF US.
Ho boy. Here we go. Please put this thing on mute if you can't take it, but make sure you watch until the end because you will see Bun luxuriating in the summer sun, belly pointed skyward. Video MVP.
Oh, and would you like my big fat mouth on your walls? No need to feel weird. Click this.
Programming note: I am going to be very busy this week preparing for my show at the Decatur Area Arts Council! Read about that here, and wish Jeff and me luck in transporting 36 paintings from our house to the gallery on Thursday.
Earlier this week I took some time off from my regularly-scheduled painting frenzy to work on a quick painting tutorial for my YouTube channel. It's the first in a series that will show you how I paint various facial features, and I will break them down one at a time, starting with eyes.
This is how I learned to draw and paint realistically when I was 14, and this was how I taught my students. In fact, a simpler version of what you see above was what we did on the first day of school every year. I think beginners are intimidated by drawing an entire face--there's just so much going on--and reducing what they are looking at into bite-sized pieces gives them confidence. Then they'll have an easier time putting it all together.
I messaged Natalie and asked if she had an example of a blue or green eye that I could paint, please please please (they're a little more challenging than brown eyes--otherwise I'd use my own or Jeff's). She immediately knew exactly what I was looking for. She zapped an incredible blue-green eye over to an ecstatic me. The model's name is Cassidy, and Tyler and Natalie took a series of magic-hour photos of her earlier this month. I love how the golden sunlight hit her eyelashes, and while I knew that capturing this effect would be challenging, I think it makes this eye special.
Yesterday Jeff and I spent the entire day editing the video and adding captions--it's harder than you might think--and here it is for you to enjoy! Please subscribe to my channel and share this with your pals. Warning: you will hear my voice for about 15 seconds as I introduce the video. But then I go away, don't worry.
This is my first Christmas painting! It's
a 10.5"x13.5" still-life of a handful of bird tree ornaments. We have quite a few,
and I like how they are kind of seasonless. I wanted to create a holiday
painting that would be tolerable year-round, and I ended up with something that can be interpreted as a secular or religious image. More on that in a bit. Here's how it came together.
These birds have a variety of textures, from the feathery peacocks and hummingbird, which at the time Jeff insisted
looked furious, to the cardinal that's made of some kind of straw-like
fiber, to the puffy white bird that's covered with sleet and glitter,
to the T-1000-looking crystal bird in the center. It's the only bird above that was truly finished. I had extra stuff to add to the rest of
them, but I was suprised by how quickly the picture was progressing after a few days' work. During this time, Jeff and I made a video for my BRAND NEW YOUTUBE CHANNEL!
Yes. I've decided to follow in my sister's massive, canyon-like footsteps and am giving YouTube a shot! The channel is called "Art Food Kitty" and will cover things like arts, foods, and kitties. It's a video version of this blog, and I'll show art demonstrations and sped-up paintings, favorite recipes (once we get the lighting in the kitchen figured out and stop hating the way we look and sound on camera), and plenty of gratuitous shots of our darling cats. Jeff and I are excited about this and it's currently occupying a lot of brain space. I've already had YouTube dreams/nightmares every night this week. Wheeee!
Our first video is embedded at the bottom of this post. But please read the next couple of paragraphs. I'll make it brief!
Moving
right along: a couple of days ago I added a sparkly star
near the center and a glittery pine cone under the hummingbird. Along
the bottom: some greenery I pulled off one of our trees and arranged on
top of a red Christmas stocking. Also in there: a blue light. At his point the stocking still needed work--I had to add shadows on the flat areas near
the right side.
This watercolor is already in a frame! I'm calling it Winged Nativity because as I mentioned earlier, this painting can be interpreted as secular or religious. On the surface, this is a
grouping of cute birds on some greenery, a red stocking, and some
aluminum foil. But if you want to dig deeper, it's a non-traditional
nativity scene. The white bird and cardinal
are Mary and Joseph (note their gold cord halos). The otherworldly
crystal bird is the baby Jesus. He is tucked under a star, wears a
glittery crown, and beneath him is a light. The hummingbird offers him a
golden pine cone, and the two other kings are peacocks. (Perhaps they
have misplaced their frankincense and myrrh and are looking for it.)
Would you like a print? You can absolutely get it as a print! Click this thing!
Buy your holiday cards now! It's Christmas in July! They're blank inside!
And now, I'd like to begin the very soft, very slow roll-out of Art Food Kitty. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE AND SHARE and watch this channel evolve! Will it ever get better? Will I figure out how to paint without my frizzy hair getting in the way of the camera (sorry about that)? Will our marriage implode over the inevitable artistic differences? Will the dreaded comments section destroy our very souls? Will our cats become superstars and leave Jeff and me in the dust? You know you want to get in on the ground floor of this thing!
