Krissy Downing - Purveyor of Figments

Trying a New Technique

A bunch of months ago I was stoked to see that my art hero, Greg “Craola” Simkins, would be teaching a painting workshop at an upcoming tattoo convention. I signed up immediately… and plopped down my $50 deposit.

Excitement mounted as weeks went on, but eventually I came to learn that my accordion player’s wedding was set to take place on the same weekend. I was to play his recessional, so I had to forfeit Greg’s painting class. :( …and I was out the $50.

A few days after, Craola posted some words and pics from his weekend at the convention - http://tinyurl.com/622nuv9 - including a shot of the class syllabus! From this (and my memory of his painting process shown in several YouTube clips), I deduced that his technique often involves a great deal of glazing.

Here, check this out. It’s mesmerizing!

So far, as I’ve tried to unravel the mysteries of painting with acrylics, I’ve just been using a lot of retarder for ease of blending… and I’ve been intimidated by the thought of glazing.

I’ve set up a small doodle of a piece to practice the technique… putting down a complete underpainting of only black and white to establish the values (although now in retrospect, it may have been wiser to have used sepia tones for what will become flesh…)

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

12x12 Show | ArtDC Gallery

I painted up some variations on a theme for ArtDC Gallery’s 12x12 exhibit going on now!

With Artomatic coming up (overlapping a little), I thought I’d play off of one of the pieces that’ll be up there, The House Eater. I consider these the children of that piece. :)

^ This is Homer. He eats homes. (12x12 acrylic on canvas)

^ This is Treena. She eats trees. (12x12 acrylic on canvas)

^ This is Carlyle. He eats cars. (12x12 acrylic on canvas)

^ And this is Sunny. (12x12 acrylic on canvas)

:)

Happy Jason Voorhees Awareness Day!

I thought I’d take this opportunity to share some old videos of me painting this famous Friday the 13th icon…

The Anatomy of the Bubble

Lately I’ve become fascinated by the idea of including bubbles in some of my current pieces. So of course, rather than go online and look through millions of available stock photos of actual bubbles to get a quick/accurate sense of how I might approach this, I just lazily sat on the floor with canvas and paint and tried to reach into my mind’s eye to figure out what a bubble should look like…

Here is the result, a not-too convincing “bubble” named Horace Littleton:

Quickly accepting that poor Horace turned out fairly effing craptastic, I decided to try again.  I examined him thoroughly and tried to pick out the parts that looked “wrong” with him, and I set out to try a few varying approaches for the next attempts, assuming a proper bubble would show up among the spewage eventually…

Here’s what I got:

I think the best candidate here is the one in the top left, but this may only be due to the fact that the stark contrast against the darker background here kind of helps it along.

Let’s look again at measly, old Horace up there. I realize he looks more like a top-down view of a half sphere than he does a completely round & transparent, 3-D bubble floating in air. This is largely because I failed to include the inverted reflection of the highlight that should be visible inside the back of the sphere.

I finally trekked up to the local Five-Below and picked up some strawberry-scented bubble solution in a little pink bottle shaped like an ice-cream bar, brought it home, and whipped out my camera…

Here is a photo of real-life, actual bubbles, Jolene & Laverne (R.I.P.):

When I look closely at the anatomy of these bubbles, I notice two major visual aspects that my mind’s eye was missing. First, there is of course the mirror image of the main light source highlight and other inner reflections which indicate the convexity of the back surface. Second, I notice that the lighting of the circumference of a bubble seems to follow the same rules of lighting & shadow on a solid (non-transparent) sphere. These bubbles both show a lit edge facing my open window (main light source) and a dark edge where (a solid sphere’s) shadow would be.

I’m ready to pour out some paint and give this another go!!

Here is an in-progress shot of the painting in which I intend to include my soon-to-be-perfected bubbles: