I remember you

This is my piece for a group show at Susanita's Little Gallery.  The theme is the Ramones!  It opens early next month.  Each artist got to choose a song to illustrate, and I chose "I Remember You", cuz I like that song.

Acrylic on board.  And fun.

the royal tenenbaums

This is my piece for the Spoke Art Gallery's Bad Dads show, opening this weekend in San Francisco!  Wish I could be there.  I wish it would get cold in Los Angeles already, too.  I bet it's fall in San Francisco right now, and I bet it's super nice.

The hardest part was getting likenesses for all the characters.  I do not consider myself very hand with caricature, so there were LOTS of super ugly, generic looking versions of everybody before I got to anything useful.  I think my favorite in the end is Royal.  Or Dudley.  Dudley was the only one I had no trouble drawing at all, strangely!

It's 20"x26",  acrylic on board.

I should accompany this painting with this fact: when I first saw this movie, I did not like it.  Nope.  I exited the theater thinking "What one EARTH was it that I just saw??"  I didn't understand the dryness of the tone, or what the story was supposed to mean, or anything about it really.  I understood that it looked really cool.

Post art school I gave it another try.  It IS one of my husbands favorite movies, and I usually trust his opinion when it comes to films (with the exception of his insatiable desire to watch old and obscure horror movies, which are usually indescribably, irredeemably  terrible).  

The second time around, it was like a lightbulb had been turned on in my brain.  After watching butt loads of movies and films in college, I finally had some context for the type of storytelling that Wes Anderson is going for.  Basically, I get it now!  But I also get why some people are still like "I don't like his movies".  They're the kind of movies that deserve investigation: you can watch them over and over and every time you do, you notice new things and make new connections.  They're very rich with content but they definitely don't give it up for free.  You have to spend time with them.  You probably have a buddy or two like that...at first, to a stranger, they seem unapproachable, and you find yourself saying "he's super cool once you get to know him."

(pssst I already put it on tumblr for you)

rose red + snow white

I'm working on a bunch of paintings at once these days.  This is the first one that got finished!  It's for a show in July, and it will have a sister piece to go with it... a diptych, if you're fancy.  

Click to see it bigger!

The show is fairy tale themed.  You know I love a good, obscure fairy tale.  You know what else I love?  Flowers, and vintage clothes, and patterns.  So all those things got wrapped up into this painting.  

It's acrylic on board, by the way, and 16"x16" square.  Haven't had it framed yet but I'm thinking something wood and vintage looking.  Usually framing is my least favorite part (who knows who will end up buying it, and what they'll like), but I can't wait to see this one all ready-to-hang.

As usual, I did a butt load of sketching before leaping into the painting.  Can you believe I really haven't done much bear drawing?  I just wanted him to be really BIG with a cute face.  And a crown.  Because if you know this fairy tale, then you know he is a prince, after all.  

I like post-its for compositions.  If you hate your drawing then you can just peel them off and throw them away.  

Yeah, flowers.  I had a moment where I thought I might do teenage versions of the sisters, and make them more contemporary, but the littler versions won.  As soon as I had the idea to put them in little mod dresses it was over with.  I might, however, still put those heart-shaped sunglasses on Snow White...

More comin'!

lock, shock + barrel

This is my Nightmare Before Christmas themed piece for a tribute show at Arludik Gallery month.  The gallery is in Paris, France.  That's right, I'm all international and stuff!  (And no I'm not going...I WISH I could just jet off to Paris for a gallery opening.)  Here are your favorite trick-or-treaters, Lock, Shock and Barrel, effing around in the moonlight!

When it comes to tribute shows of any kind, I like to do pieces with more peripheral characters.  I have a special love for Nightmare, as I saw it when I was  about eight and thought it was perhaps the BEST THING EVER.  I had friends whose mother's forbade them to see it, because it was 'scary'.  Whaaaat?  What a bunch of weenies.  This movie was also the subject of argument between me and my eight-year-old friends, since they insisted it was claymation, and when I tried to explain stop motion to them they plainly disregarded me and my amateur animation knowledge.  

My other favorite movies when I was eight:  The Dark Crystal, The Princess Bride, Alice in Wonderland, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  All the ones that scared the other children.  

Oh yes, and one more thing:  I've erased my old portfolio blog and replaced it with a new, shiny tumblr portfolio blog.  To see it, you can either click the 'portfolio' button or just CLICK HERE!

And one last thing:  I've started a twitter.  Admittedly, I'm not a very good twitter-er.  I'm kind of lame in that I don't totally 'get' twitter (if indeed there is anything to get).  Maybe I will get better if you start following me.  I'm gonna try harder!  HERE I AM!

bring your record player

Another painting for the Norman Rockwell show in July!  It is the horizontal sister to the other painting of teenagers.  I took these pictures really quickly and sloppily immediately after I finished it, and then I packed it up and sent it on its way.  

This is my favorite part.  

A portable record player is a good thing to have.  I've got one.  It's not pink though, unfortunately.  

A big gross mess!  I used that brown paper (actually cut up Trader Joe's bags) to wrap up the two paintings.  Recycle and stuff!

I kind of went with a different process for this painting than I did for the other.  I didn't really make an initial sketch, instead I did some little studies and then drew the sketch directly onto the primed board.  Then I scanned it (in pieces...I hate doing that) and did a digital color key.  I always like the way the sloppy color pass looks better than the finished painting.  It has more something.  I'm not sure what.  

I'm not quite as pleased with this one as I was with the other one, but c'est la vie.  I was also in a tremendous hurry to get this one done, and I'm sure that had something to do with it.  Working under pressure is tricky.  Sometimes it forces you to be more awesome in a smaller amount of time, and at the end you are so happy and you feel like you WON!  But other times you can't escape that gross feeling that you really just don't have enough time and what you're trying to do isn't going to happen, and you go into lazy auto-pilot mode.  

In any case, it's time for me to drink an iced coffee, so til next time!

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!!