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!
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.
Jeff and I met on Match.com--ain't no shame in it!--and one of the things he liked about my profile was that I had answered the "What was the last great book you read?" question with The Grapes of Wrath. It was one of those books that had somehow slipped through the cracks of my reading life, and I remember finishing it while sitting on a bench in Chicago's Union Station. The devastating ending made me cry, and then I just stared at things for a while, a character Edward Hopper had forgotten to paint: Heartbroken Lonely Woman Crying Over A Book.
Anyway, one of the characters in that book is named Rose of Sharon, and I always thought that was so unusual--she has a preposition in her name! Last year we were shopping for plants to decorate our new patio, and I flipped out when I came across a rose of Sharon. The man who sold it to us said it was blue, which is not as common as the white and pink version, and after planting it, we waited for about a month for it to bloom. It's in the center of the above photo.
I took a photo of the first rose and saved the picture for a future painting. I started it a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't all that revved up to paint it at first, but after a day of work I was excited. I loved the light on the petals, and the variety of blues and purples I used to create the bloom was challenging.
I fine-tuned the white thing and added more details and texture to the petals.
Then I filled in the background with some bloopy, blurry colors, and I started the rocks in the lower-left corner. Most of the white areas would become leaves and branches.
Next
up: I spent a lot of time with that dry grass on the left side. It had
lots of different blurry colors going on. I texturized the rocks with purples, blues, pinks, and browns. Finally, I did some yellow underpainting
on the leaves, masked off the major veins (seen above as yellow lines) and added an
additional green glaze over the top.
More leaf work...
I
added a lot of details to the leaves and attempted to soften and refine
the veins. Leaves in direct sunlight called for bits of blue, permanent green light, and a whole lot of no-paint. The bigger/closer leaves required some micro veins. This process reminded me of the way I painted the colorful leaf from my Mushrooms painting a year and a half ago. The colors in the photo above are a bit too bright--I took the picture during a thunderstorm and got aggressive with it in Photoshop.
On my last day of painting, I added a branch and some grassy shapes in the center. Those were surprisingly complex and colorful. And then, as if on cue, our new scanner arrived in the mail!
Eleven years ago I bought a kind of so-what HP scanner that did a wonderful job with my watercolors and cartoons, and Bun liked to sit on it, too. When it died in 2009, I assumed it would be easy to find a replacement. But that was not the case--the ones we've tried since then can't handle subtle color changes or things like pastel colors outlined in black pen.
Last month Jeff did some research (and great things happen when Jeff does some research). He found a used Epson Perfection V30 for only $30. A watercolor artist had blogged about this scanner and showed how to configure the settings to work for watercolors. It seemed like such a great deal, especially when you consider that I tend to pay $12-$15 per big scan at FedEx. The only problem was that the vendor was in Hawaii, and the scanner had to endure a month-long boat odyssey and cross-country road trip before it reached us.
We set it up and scanned my painting (which was too big to fit) in two sections. Photoshop miraculously pieced them together--seamless! We were impressed at how the scanner even managed to pick up on the texture (or tooth) of my watercolor paper. Terrific!
And you can find prints of this new painting if you click here!
Imagekind has finally gotten its act together, and now my other new-ish floral paintings are available as prints, too!
For the first time in two years, a medium-sized snowstorm hit our town yesterday, and today as Jeff and I wolfed down our lunch, I mentioned that I wanted to make a snowman. Surprisingly, Jeff was into the idea--"Let's do it now!" Of course, we couldn't do the same old played-out normal snowman. We made a snowBun.
It took us a little while to get on the same page as to how this snowBun would come together, but soon enough we established the Garfield-ish main form and began fine tuning it.
I messed around with the photo settings on this one to make the profile more visible.
We took turns making the face--I roughed in the main shape and eye sockets while Jeff refined the ears and added the features. He was charmingly businesslike while I emerged as the project's cheerleader.
It's my belief that if Bun had existed during Biblical times, people would have created golden idols in her image. So it was all too appropriate for Jeff and me to make a snow sculpture of a creature that we basically worship every day.
That face cracks me up.
This is the view of our snowBun from the house. She's not long for this world--this weekend we'll have highs in the fifties with a good chance of rain.
But this was so much fun, and for about an hour we felt like a couple of kids. We came inside soggy and gleeful. Bun groggily hopped downstairs, glanced at her giant likeness out in the yard, and demanded some wet food.
Tomorrow is my sister Emily's birthday, and due to travel and scheduling issues, I had to give her this painting on Christmas. Emily (a.k.a. Poof) is used to this kind of thing, as is anyone born on or around December 25, but I felt bad about not being with her on her actual birthday. So to make up for it, I decided to give her something extra special.
I took the reference photo about a year and a half ago when Poof and I traveled to New York City together (she met Mally Roncal, one of her makeup heroes, and you can read all about that here, and there's even a video). In the photo, Poof is saying goodbye to Cupcake, her goofy and adorable little cat. When she's not asleep, Cupcake has that hyper-alert expression at all times. I thought about using the entire photo for the painting, but I loved my sister's face so much that I wanted it to be the focus.
Unfortunately for this blog, I accidentally deleted the three in-progress photos I took of the painting. I painted Poof's face, arms, and part of Cupcake's face on the first day, finished Cupcake on the second day, and completed Poof's hair and dress on the third. The painting is smallish at 11x14 inches, so I knew it would go quickly. I found a terrific half-price frame that I bought with an additional 40% discount--always great when something like that happens. Here's a photo of the framed painting (Poof quickly Instagrammed it).
Poof had no idea I was painting her, so when I presented her with the painting yesterday, she was surprised and quickly became teary-eyed. As usual, no one tops my sister when it comes to reacting to my paintings, or any gift, really. You want to have this kid at your Christmas party, bottom line. Here's a short video of part of her reaction--the first 15 seconds or so were cut off when Jeff realized he was shooting it vertically.
Happy birthday, Poof! <3
PS I turned this painting into some products on my CafePress store, including cups, bags, cards, and a 2013 one-page calendar print. You can find it along with my multi-page calendars, including the one with Mabel (above) here. Make sure you indicate that you want a 2013 calendar, not 2012. This new painting will be on my 2014 calendar.
And you can also buy art prints on paper or canvas (above) by going here. Thanks as always for your support this year!
Last weekend Jeff and I hosted our family's Thanksgiving for the second year in a row. My parents, my brother Ryan, my sister Emily/Poof and her husband Tyler, Jeff's parents, and his daughter Melissa were all there, and everyone on my side of the family stayed overnight.
We had a great time with lots of laughs, and Poof put together a video for her second YouTube channel, Beauty Vlogcast. Since I was too busy cooking to take lots of photos, some of what you'll see here are screen-grabs from that video. Jeff also took some photos of the food moments before we destroyed it. So thank you, Jeff and Poof!
Mom, Dad, Poof, Tyler, and Ryan arrived in the morning, and I made sure they had plenty to snack on. We planned to eat the big meal at around 5:00, so the above spread, along with a massive pot of chili, kept everyone happy until then.
I've already blogged about everything you see above. It's great to have some recipes that I know people will like, and they included pumpkin cookies, seasonally spiced nuts, li'l smokies, a roasted red pepper cheesecake, the heavyset cheeseball, various crackers, cheese, and vegetables, and tiny peach and raspberry star-topped pies (I changed that recipe, using the same crust but filling the pies with peach preserves and raspberry jam). Mom kindly made one of her spectacular apple pies.
I loved seeing my family, and we enjoyed a relaxing afternoon laughing, snacking, and telling stories.
Ryan, Tyler, Poof, and Dad entertained our cats in the living room. Tyler's holding one of the festive mimosas that he and Poof made for everyone.
Mom helped Jeff and me while we puttered around the kitchen. Jeff wanted try something different with the turkey this year, and he did a great job preparing Tom Colicchio's butter-and-herb recipe here. He started working on it at around noon, taking it out of the oven to baste it every half-hour or so.
A couple of hours before the turkey was supposed to be finished, Jeff took its temperature just for the heck of it, and to our great alarm we discovered that our turkey was done! Upon further examination of the recipe, we learned that Tom had called for a 14 to 16 pound turkey, and ours was only 12 pounds. So that made a big difference, and suddenly I was scrambling to get the sides together for our meal, which had just been moved up two hours.
I made Parmesan smashed potatoes, which usually take about 45 minutes from start to finish, and put the stuffing and sweet potatoes into the oven. Luckily I had prepared those ahead of time, along with cranberry sauce, and the rolls were a heat-and-eat situation. Meanwhile, Jeff carved the turkey breast and Mom got as much meat as she could from the rest of the bird. Jeff's folks arrived with their extra table, and soon all we were waiting for was Melissa and her ratatouille. And Melissa was running pretty late, so we stuffed almost the entire feast into our oven's warming drawer and hoped for the best. When she arrived, I hope I didn't appear too exasperated.
Me: [I can't remember if I even said hi to her, sorry Mel!] What temperature?
Mel: I don't know.
Me: How long?
Mel: Until it's done?
I popped it in the already-hot oven, set it for 20 minutes, and figured that would work (it did). The warming drawer did its job too, and I relaxed and got the buffet organized.
That turkey was so good, by the way! We were lucky to have caught it at just the right time.
That's Melissa's ratatouille in the foreground. It was nice and light, and it contrasted nicely with the carb- and butter-tastic dishes that made up the rest of the meal.
Everyone was stuffed to the gills, as we say in Illinois, but certain people who were in New York City last month demanded dessert immediately after the meal, so Jeff and I broke out a couple of our lethal candy bar pies (pictured above with our creepy sumo gnome) along with Mom's apple pie. Readers of this blog may recall our trip to the Momofuku Milk Bar in New York and the little dessert we began referring to as the meth pie. Melissa bought the Milk Bar's cookbook for me a few weeks ago--and it is just the greatest thing--so Jeff and I could make the meth pie for Thanksgiving.
Which we did! This pie was INSANE. Even the pie's creator Christina Tosi describes her pie version of a Take 5 candy bar as "a little bit of a bitch to make," and indeed it was. It's four recipes in one, and one of those recipes contains a sub-recipe. The instructions go on for eight pages. It took two people two days to make these pies, and the recipes involved four dangerous experiences with boiling sugar water. You guys, we made nougat. Nougat is apparently something people can make!
Just to break it down for you: it's a chocolate cookie crust topped with a thick layer of not-runny-but-not-solid caramel that is a little bit of a bitch to make, peanut butter nougat made with crushed peanut brittle that you of course have to create yourself, and a toasted pretzel trapped between a mixture of white and dark chocolate (melted together to form a super-chocolate).
I'm not going to copy eight pages of recipe for you. As far as I can tell, only a few people on the Internet have attempted to make this pie. If you want to give it a try, you're just going to have to buy the book, and I wish you good luck in your baking endeavors.
And make no mistake: we're totally making this pie again sometime. I'm thinking this would be a fine activity for when we're snowed in and bored out of our minds. The next time a blizzard hits, I'll be the one in the store stocking up on butter, chocolate, and peanuts while everyone else is buying flashlights and snow shovels and salt and stuff.
BACK TO THANKSGIVING.
The next morning I had apple dumplings for everyone. My family had made it through the night with our cats afoot. Poof had a migraine headache before she went to bed, and she said she had trouble sleeping, but luckily she felt better by morning.
Poof loves these apple dumplings, and I received the best reaction of my cooking life when she tried them for the first time last year, so I had to make them again. You can find the recipe here. They're a teeny tiny bit of a bitch to make, but they're worth the hassle because things like this happen:
SHE IS SO CUTE. And the following is my favorite frame from Poof's video:
I love when Poof gets that glimmer of ramping-up-craziness in her eyes. You want Poof at every meal you serve, trust me.
And here is Poof's video of Thanksgiving! Look at my family moving around doing things and talking to you!
I seriously do not know why I do that thing with my mouth when I talk or how I can ever stop. It disturbs me as much as it disturbs you, it's all I can see, and I apologize for any emotional distress it may have caused you and your family.
Thanks to you, my dear readers, for getting all the way down here to the bottom of this post, and I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, too.
See, here's the problem: my original paintings are expensive. They've got to be--some of them take over a month to create. I can't afford them, either! But this year I've had reasonably good luck selling them on Imagekind as prints in a variety of formats and sizes. However, even those can be a little pricey when you factor in a mat and a frame, and maybe you want something more functional...? That's the vibe I'm getting from you, anyway.
So last week I put together a store on CafePress. They reproduce my watercolors on fun and useful items hand-picked by me from their massive selection of over 250 products. There's something for everyone, with a variety items for sale for under $20, including gorgeous mirror compacts that are already my best sellers.
T-shirts are available for people of all ages, shapes, and sizes, and they come in a range of colors. Making this happen took a whole day. It was hard, you guys!
And come on: you need at least one calendar. We all do. I agonize over that decision every year. I'm so happy to finally present my first-ever calendars featuring my own paintings: normal-sized, oversized, vertical, and single image.
Get in on this and help support your friendly neighborhood artist/blogger/butter-consumption-enabler! And I know, CafePress is kind of a behemoth that's probably only marginally less evil than Walmart, and I'm certainly not going to make a fortune here, but maybe it will help me buy Bun's medicine every month...?
I sifted through my heaving U2 digital folders today and put together a selection of images that includes personal favorites such as the always-game Pop Edge, Adam and Bono painted on blue construction paper, and a citrus-y Screaming Green Bono. Because most of my originals were only 5-10 inches tall, lot of these prints are small, but you'll see a handful that can be majorly enlarged.
You'll see all of those along with more straightforward and normal-seeming pictures of this promising little rock 'n' roll outfit from across the sea here. URL is:
