kim and jim

So, I was invited to be in this show. I watched this movie and did a bunch of sketches, and then decided that I'd feature the 'villain' of the story in my piece instead of the hero, because while Edward gets a lot of love, poor, beefy, angry Jim (Anthony Michael Hall) gets nothing.

Also, I thought it'd be fun to document my painting process. Why not? I'm not sure that you'll be able to glean any "secrets" or "techniques" or any of that stuff from these pictures, but at the very least they're interesting to look at!


I started off with a little doodle of what I wanted the painting to look like! This sketch is really only like 1 1/2" tall. It doesn't need to be much bigger than that to get its point across. You can pretty much tell what's goin on, compositionally.

I scanned it, brought it in to old photoshop, and did some color stuff! I did a bunch of different color ideas but this one (which was pretty close to what I'd imagined) was the best.

I got this big piece of very cheap board from an art store and cut it down to the size I wanted. I didn't gesso the board, I just gave it a coat of really ugly bright magenta paint. I don't have a good reason for choosing that color. I just had a really big bottle of pink paint that I wanted to use up. Anyway, once I had a layer of paint down the next few coats of paint had something to grab onto, so that's what that's all about. Please note: my paints are mostly of the cheap-o variety.

I took a big turquoise colored pencil and sketched in my dinosaur bush, Jim and Kim. For some reason I suddenly felt that I should switch Kim with Jim so they're different than they were in my first sketch. I don't know why! It just seemed right! Also I started to lay in some paint, mostly just for texture and rough shapes. It looks awful at this point, doesn't it??

Nooooow it starts looking a little more like something, although not much more...

It's slowly coming together, but only sort of. Usually somewhere in the middle of working on a picture you have a moment where you think "This is awful. This isn't going to work. What was I thinking? What IS THIS??" I was having that thought about here. If you recognize that feeling, you know it eventually goes away if you keep working...

I don't have a hierarchy of what I work on first or last or whatever. It's usually more like, "What do I feel like painting now??" I felt like getting Winona resolved. Winona Ryder is hard to catch a likeness of. She's pretty and all, but she kinda doesn't have any really defining features. Anthony was pretty easy. I just had to make him look angry and red.

Finally past that "this is garbage" feeling! It's starting to look like a painting!

OH! THAT'S what it's supposed to look like! The piece is BIG (for me at least!) and won't fit on my tiny scanner, so you will have to be content with these grainy iphone pictures of the finished product. I like how it came out.

It was missing something, so I added leaves and branches to the ground around the dino-topiary. It gives you the feeling that Edward was just there, even though he's not in the picture at all.

Grrrr!!