Daily Monsters

I swear I really do draw every day. I just don't scan every day.

Illustration Friday
"Breezy"

I took the easy way out this week. At least I didn't dig through old work to find one that matches the theme...

*Stepping on soapbox*
C'mon people. The whole point of Illustration Fridays is to ILLUSTRATE and to create something new each week. It doesn't do you any good to just recycle your old work. You're not getting any better and it's lame as hell.
*Stepping off soapbox*

Daily Monsters
Had a little catching up to do...

Illustration Friday:
"Instinct"
I believe love is the greatest instinct Humans have. We don't have many so we should make the most of the ones we have.

Daily Monsters
Someone started a Daily Monsters thread on a forum I like and since no one who reads this blog will ever see it I thought I'd share my monsters here.

Illustration Friday:
Celebrate

I thought I'd combine Daily Monsters with this week's theme.

Illustration Friday

"Time"

Illustration Friday:

Flawed

I decided to try and commit to illustration Friday (http://www.illustrationfriday.com/).

The poor bird is always going the wrong direction. Not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing but I can relate.

Step By Step
Christmas Painting

I had never done a step by step before and thought it would be interesting. This is basically how I do every painting.

It always starts with the sketchbook. Usually I just sketch whatever I feel like and the cool ones turn into paintings. In this case I needed to come up with a layout that showed a family of 7 people. I started with thinking about a family tree and did a good amount of sketching at work on yellow notepads during meetings. I seriously fall asleep if I don't sketch during meetings.

I found that the tree thing just wasn't working and went in the direction of individual portraits on a wall.

Here I'm flushing out layout and background etc.

Because I wanted to get all the frames to line up correctly I did a digital layout. I usually don't do any part on the computer prefering to just work out the drawing right on the board.

I primed a board with gesso and did my under drawing in pencil.



Next I erase the pencil until it's very light, then paint in all the outlines.



The follies of doing most of this very late at night is that I get dumber as it gets later. Here I've reduced the number of frames to seven from nine. You'd think with a college education I could count. You'd be wrong.

Pencil drawings of the family. When doing a portrait I always struggle with trying to make them look like the individuals while still being me.

Again, I erase the pencil until it's very light then paint the outlines.

This shows the tinting where I use some type of earth color. Raw Umber here I think. I also like Burnt Sienna. If any of the board shows through on the final painting I don't want it to be the white gesso. I think it looks much better for an earthy color to be the ground as it were. White showing through looks cheap.

I've painted the first pass of the wallpaper and fleshtones. I also made a correction to Lisa's hairline.

Second pass on the wallpaper as well as a color glaze to "tie it all together".

Working on individual portraits. Background, hair and flesh. I'm well into the "ugly phase" where I hate the painting.

More hair/flesh/backgrounds/polka dot hat and frames being worked on. I'm coming around to not hating it so much.

Added final tweaks to flesh/hair/eye color/shadows and put my name on it. Finished painting early morning on December 24 and Lisa picked it up later that morning. There is something to be said for working in acrylics and fast drying times is probably on top of the list.

I was "tagged" by my wife (I know I should keep that sort of thing in the privacy of our...wait, my mom reads this I'm stopping now):

10 years ago I was:
1. Debt Free
2. Enjoying the SLC scene
3. Painting a lot more than now
4. Freshly Married
5. Snowboarding an awful lot

5 things on today's to do list:
1. Finish the Holiday comps
2. Finish my LLC set up
3. Tweak the boiler
4. Be with my family
5. Stay awake

5 things I would do if I were a millionaire:
1. Pay off both my houses (don't judge me)
2. Put most of the rest away
3. Take Candace where ever she wants to go for as long as she wants
4. Lifetime supply of film/paper/chemicals
5. Help out a friend

5 places I have lived:
1. California
2. Utah
3. Maine
4. Massachusetts
5. New Jersey

5 places I have worked:
1. EMULSION Magazine
2. DSW Advertising
3. Waterford Learning Institute
4. MyFamily.com
5. Bare Necessities

(added for seasonal flair)
5 things I have been for halloween:
1. Batman!
2. Mummy
3. Handsome Devil
4. Giant Paper Mache Skeleton Head
5. Bob Ross

MANWORLD!

Manworld is dedicated to me. I'm a man. I like building stuff so I'm building stuff for Manworld.
First on the list of Manworld stuff to build is a darkroom sink. Below is an account of how it's coming along.


I started with a pile of 2x4 lumber which I forced to fit together all nice-like. I used my very photogenic children as scale.

Nothing in Manworld will ever smell like lavender. Especially if that pipe breaks.

At this point I could stop here and have a perfectly acceptable, albeit freakishly long, workbench. This thing is sturdy, solid and heavy. I decided to push on and not give up.

Setting up to see how the sides shape up before the glue and nail gun are used. The sink is 8" deep on the front and sides.

After the plywood sides were attached I added pine boards to the front and sides which covers the ugly plywood and 2x4 construction while adding rigidity. I also added a supporting strip of plywood to the back and some moulding to the edges. The edges now have about 3" where a man can rest his arms while agitating a tray of developer or contemplating...things.

There was much sanding and caulking and filling in of nail holes before the first coat of primer was applied (tonight actually). My father-in-law will be seeing this sink tomorrow so it better be presentable.

This is one coat of primer. I will do one more inside then paint everything with a color before applying a clear epoxy paint to the inside. The epoxy will make the sink hold water. A drain will go on the right end and I will need to install a sump pump to get the wastewater up to the big cast iron pipe. There's also the matter of plumbing hot and cold water with a tempreture gauge and filters and a few faucets.

We had the baby...

For more info/pics please see Candace's blog: www.spyderette.blogspot.com

Portrait of Pregnant Candace


I thought I'd keep the trend going and make a portrait of Candace while she's pregnant. The last time we had a painting done by Wilson Ong (google him y'all) and since Candace still had the same nightgown I figured what the hell. Although I'm not sure you can call it a trend because this is only the second and last time this will be done. Somehow we missed doing this with our first kid. We must have been too freaked out by the prospect of actually having a baby that it just didn't happen.


Candace was kind enough to come out to the arbor that leads to the woods in our backyard. I'm biased but I like it.

I took one roll with the medium format and 4 sheets with 8x10. I developed the roll and made a contact sheet. This is my favorite but there are also two or three others I like.

Impending Human Addition

For those of you just joining us (you know who you are) we are due to welcome a new addition to our little family any day now. Candace had an ultrasound today to check her fluid level (don't ask) and came home with this.

If you squint really hard you can see our fat little chubby-cheeked baby. Still not sure what we're going to name her...probably Dagmar.

Poison Ivy Can Kiss My Butt

If you ever wanted to see every single variety of poison ivy you could come and walk around our yard. We have the bush kind, the low ground cover kind and the vine kind. The stuff is literally everywhere. I've been spraying like crazy all summer and have knocked it back from the areas we use in most of the yard.

The vines are particularly maddening. My sprayer will only go so high up the trees so there's lots of dead leaves down low but up higher the evil stuff couldn't be happier.

When I started cutting down the trees that had to go (and happened to be covered in vines) I was always very careful that if it touched my hands/arms/face I would immediately come in and wash with hot soapy water. I've never been around this stuff until moving to New Jersey so I read all the horror stories online...

One time I was ripping down a vine of what I thought was virginia creeper then realized it was poison ivy. It was all over my hands and arms and I was right in the middle of trying to get trees cut down and limbs cut up so I waited to go and wash. Then I totally forgot all about it. I had no reaction. Another time working on the same tree I caught a bunch of it to my face. Again no reaction. Apparently about 25% of people are immune to poison ivy. Lucky me I'm one of them.

Dead leaves on the bottom-healthy leaves just out of reach of my sprayer. Now I just yank the damn vines right off the tree and up root as much as I can. Now that I have special powers poison ivy can kiss my butt. You're going down sucka!

Tire Swing!

The kids have been talking about a tire swing ever since we started talking about buying a house. Every yard we looked at was evaluated based on if we could hang a tire swing or not. Well, I finally got around to hanging it.

Old truck tire: $0

Chain and hardware: $40

Happy kids: Priceless

The Yard

The inside of the house has been getting a lot of attention so I thought I'd post some pics of what we're faced with outside...
This is the front and where I put the piles of yard stuff for the city to come collect. No one knows when they come and no one has seen them. Every few weeks or so the piles just disapear. Currently I have 11 piles in the front and 4 in the back. I've done this three times so far.

Looking from the front down the backyard is this side strip of open area next to our yard. It's a favorite spot for fireflies in the evening and butterflies during the day. I ride my bike down a good stretch of this until I get to the road with the nice bike lane.

This is the street behind our yard. It's called Jenny Jump lane, how cool is that?

Our yard is made up of half usable area and half "forest". The back half is the forest part.

From the strip of open grass next to our yard looking into the woods of our backyard.

I think at one point the woods were maintained but it's been a long-long time since anyone has put a hand to this stuff. Here's Alexander standing in the old arbor. He's probably getting several mosquito bites.

On the other side of our house is this area. There used to be six or so old pines and a sick crabapple tree here. Half of the crabapple was actually a very healthy collection of poison ivy vines. Now it's a great spot for a swing set.

For Father's day this year Candace gave me a chainsaw. We named it Pepe and it's awesome!

More of Pepe's handiwork. Crabapple stump.

In the back woods there are two sheds. This one was still in great shape except there was a huge willow leaning over it and several smaller trees blocking access to willow. What's that Pepe? But of course you can.

The kids actually talk to Pepe and I now have to do the "voice" all the time. I also have to do the voice of the sledghammer named DonCarlos.

Here's the other shed just as you go into the woods. I kinda want to put a moonshine still in there or something but it's falling apart.

I literally hit the back twice with DonCarlos...