My Spare Time Work

Iron Man!

I really like Iron Man hence the following photo, I don't know what I'm doing with this whether I am keeping it , I would love to do that but It was for my boarding house originally, it is based of Vol. 7 Iron Man  with a few adaptations it started with a trace and then an A5 version and somebody suggested I make a big one for a house so I made an A3 version.

I love it so much It makes me excited to look at it, is that weird? And now Spiderman has company, I suddenly want to have a superhero page if I get enough I will make that.

Spiderman!

A friend of mine was looking through my book and asked me if I could do him a superhero drawing, looking forward to seeing the new spiderman movie he asked if he could get a drawing of spiderman himself and as it wouldn't take to long I obliged. He selected the photo and asked if I could do It in black and white and then reversed colour, anti black and white.

I had some miscommunication about it so there are a few odd spots but I cleaned it up mostly Originally There was going to be a white background but due to an accident I needed to hide it the best way being, add a background. A good art lesson is pretend it's on purpose and fix it quietly.

Overall it came out very well considering how quickly I did it.

Self Portrait Two

After my painting on a mirror from a photo I needed to do one from a mirror not on one. It was going to be a standard painting when I was inspired!

The amatuer artist Celia Giménez  (although "amatuer" gives her too much credit) ruined this 1930's fresco previously know as Ecce Homo, behold the man it has been renamed by twitter  Ecce Mono, behold the monkey. It's not all bad the town has record tourist numbers and since first attempting to create this post it has become the newest biggest internet Meme. It is also on a T-Shirt I will soon posses.

    In honour of this dearly departed fresco I created a new one is this damp style. Unfortunately the Blogger photo interface had become infinitely unmanageable, Blogger auto-rotates photos Picnic can counteract this, Picnic has been closed. I can't stop Blogger from auto-rotating portrait photos to landscape. I have spent a day trying to fix this and have found no solution yet please tell me if you know one.

FIXED!

It's by no means perfect I got the colours on the shirt the wrong way around but the focus is on the face and any mistakes have been covered up, mostly. You can see I redid the entire nose area as it is slightly less worn despite this I am proud. I was having difficulty with a mirror self portrait so I decided to do one as quick as possible I finished it in about an hour my quickest speed and added in the background and redid the nose after a break. On the whole it went very well. 

Rushmore School Kitchen

I have moved all of the posts of this topic to one place in the interest of saving space.

Part One Out Of One

    After failing to get a job during the summer (I was aiming to high) that was actually kind of free work experience, I have found something else to do and this is slightly more profitable but not really a job. I am helping redo the kitchen of Rushmore School,    its apparently quite plain looking I have not seen it yet, I am currently in the design stage with a bit of help from the Cookery teacher and I want to show you what I have so far.


     A small disclaimer among this over qualified team of three, me, cookery teacher and a (not really) famous theatre designer called mum so I did a little designing I'm in it for the painting.
Here are the "Portraits" I will Paint

And here is a general idea of what it will look like, (very roughly) but in a line along the wall this was to get an idea for the colours.

The walls will be like the top section but all painted the portraits won't be next to each other, this  is a basic idea stripes black purple silver and portraits of apparently famous chefs. I did the photos using picasa 3 colour correction, posterise, duo-tone and HDR-ish. I think it looks pretty cool but to be honest that's the extent of my expertise.

This one was just colour correction and posterise, you could argue it's better but its a bit difficult and the different people don't fit as well. Hopefully the black will work well with the black and purplish. Also we have cooked up some ideas that may be a bit more practical involving cuts of meat, involving some animal cross sections, like everything I scale up I use a projector pan and acetate and occasionally a printer.

 Wish me well.
As of now everything has been sized up onto the wood to be painted.

Mission Complete

    I have finished painting and the paintings are up, Hurrah. Here is the finished room,

and here is some during and after 

    The giant master-chef m is the initial of the teacher. If I had to summarise I would say it's now sharp, bearing in mind the only expense was paying me.

         Now the paintings are hanging and I have done my job I will talk a bit about the individual paintings starting with Lorraine Pascale.

    This was the one I saved till because I belied it to be the must difficult, technically it was not the most difficult and I didn't find it the hardest but it took a lot of time just because of all of the blobs of colour. the photo was not the best either because of the single block over the face the nose kind of disappeared into a blob. because I simplified to colours. so I had to redo the effects  to get a better photo. It's still not perfect but it's a lot better.

    Jamie Oliver was a simple one on the face but I accidentally reversed it when I traced it but that wasn't the problem, the colours to the top right were not mixed and for some reason I decided not to mix them. I had also smoothed out the lines when I sketched it, that is when I realised that having "bumpy" lines made it look better so I had to add it in which took a long time.

Gordon was pretty difficult for the same reason Jamie Oliver was because of the left side of his face I didn't have a colour for, other than that it was much easier and is in my opinion one of the best.

     This was the first one I picked it because it looked the easiest and it was, unusually I had no problems.

Self portrait

For my school holiday work I was asked to make a self portrait from a photo and one from a mirror, I responded with this 

a self portrait from a picture on a mirror. I must state this is a work in progress it is almost done but my lips are to small and some colour needs touching up. I have some tips if you want to paint on something smooth like glass or a mirror you have to be impasto or get it right in one layer, if you use water the next layer will lift it, I am yet to try oils though.

You can see i have gone for the impasto technique I wasn't sure about a close up because it looks better from a distance but you're not idiots.

The shirt area is the worst you can tell from the central block, I added water and can't face redoing it because I will get lifted paint everywhere, because it is watered down the mirror shows through so it looks a tad ugly at the wrong angle but once again a work in progress.

GCSE Results

    I got my GCSE results today or yesterday as it is now passed midnight and my laptop blue-screened as I finished, anyway. To get an A* in art you need 97% and I got 100% I believe I am granted at least one paragraph for brag rights, Ok. Done

    Anyway on topic to celebrate my result I thought I would share some of my GCSE work unfortunately between switching to my laptop from my PC a few of my photos have gone missing, my two favourite of the four I have lined up but I should get back to showing you them later.

This piece was my second painting of the GCSE course and is a kind of benchmark, before GCSE I had never drawn as well painted as well or done anything as well so this was a huge jump in my standards, it also became a icon of my work, people didn't admire it or anything but if they saw it or anything like it they would instantly know it was mine. (not difficult only 200 people in the senior school)

    This one as confusing as it seems was the final piece of my illustration topic, but all you need is a tenuous link, this is several loosely strung tenuous links. This shortly overtook my painting as benchmark, this paintbrush is also a recurring theme throughout my artwork (how do you spell recurring like a Brit)

and many more not that brush or anything that looks like it is my new "icon"

    Back to the piece at hand it was supposed to have some bits of text around it but I never got round to it I am kind of glad as I think It may have taken away, this piece was heavily inspired by Peter Callesen you need to look at his work he makes white paper and card from craft into the finest of fine art.

    As for the meaning behind this work I can't say because it is so tenuous and I need my sketchbook for details but it is in school for some exam remarking thing, simply it is supposed to show how much I like painting.

    Here is a photo of the right and centre of my GCSE exhibit.

The ones I would like to talk about are the skulls on the right and rightmost light up frame left of the unfinished painting, thats linked in with the noticeboard, but I would rather wait till I can get better photos.

    That is all I have for now until I can find the photos or take new photos of the other two pieces.

    My tips to anyone doing any thing like GCSE or GCSE itself don't do it unless you really want to it's a lot of work you also need to write about it, to get a decent grade although you may like spontaneous things you need a long developed thought process. I did my first final piece in a few weeks and spent the rest of the project filling up the middle of the book, like the paintbrush make it up don't let logic and sense get it the way of good work. Finally never ever leave it to the last minute stay on top of it Art is easy if you produce decent work write nonsense and keep on time and up to date.

My art has pride of place, but they still stacked some fragile things and didn't plug in the electrics. I don't want to think about the things that don't have pride of place.

most of the art work you can see is mine, the deer skull I did is sitting on a light-box work that hasn't been plugged in. I will have some better photos of this when its all in place soon.

Self portraits 

 Two of my task for the holiday are to do self portraits one from a mirror and one from a photo I started by sketching, I have never done a self portrait so sketching seemed the normal thing to do to try and get used to drawing my own face as there was to be no tracing.

 Naturally there is some fail to be expected so there is some odd proportion and cartooish looks going on but there is worse to come.

Why wont the pictures line up?

there we go.

Here is the worst I decided to try some watercolour having not painted for ages and I rediscovered that you should NEVER EVER USE WHITE. or you get something like attempt one, once realising this I moved onto attempt two where I discovered I need way more pink washes fortunately my sketching skill improved slightly but for some reason it was a terrible day for faces.

Moving on we have self portraits from a mirror the reason I took a photo of the mirror is because you may see it later, ohhhh mystery.

This one started as one of two or three sketches but soon evolved into a pencil portrait, I am a bit disappointed by the off centre nose but don't fancy revisiting it as this was fun just like Vol. 2 was, being a perfectionist would ruin it. ]

    It was fun, surprisingly when coming from a mirror. I started on my shirt before realising I would die before finishing it but I like the stylish collar I am left with and am contemplating adding shoulders as lined but I think this is fine, you may also notice the eyebrow, that is my art face I use it when I draw so it made sense to put it in.

Concerning the hair, it isn't a gap.

What I Did In The Lake District

    I went to see The Dark Knight Rises and got a haircut, after watching TDKR when combined with this weeks magazine I decided to do something superhero like. I didn't have any internet so I decided to work from my memory. I started with Iron man and then moved onto Batman.

    I love Iron man and batman but I could only remember the cartoon versions and they weren't very detailed so I decided to try the most complicated I knew The Hulk, don't ask me how I remember the cartoon, I know what I have done on the shoulder isn't right though.

    I also tried to do a few side profiles this marks the start of my preparation for my dreaded self portraits, the top left side profile doesn't have a ridiculous chin that is the start of the hair of the one below.

    I planed to colour these in Pro-marker but I don't have the colours necessary if I buy them in the future I will revisit these drawings, I hope you enjoyed.

My Other Task

    Was to produce a logo for my mums birthday, I knew I would need a lot of them but I didn't want a tacky printout so I settled for a screen print. I didn't have much time and as I was doing a screen print it had to be simple as I don't use light sensitive emulsion.

    I decided to go for a pun simple easy and effective so I made a page exploring a few ideas, I soon discovered OlymPicNic. Oh so punny I explored a few of my ideas below experimenting with using the Olympic rings but decided no colour was a cop-out.

    I printed out my template traced it onto a screen in pencil and painted it with screen drawing fluid followed by a print with screen block. 

    

    Washing out the screen fluid left my stencil, throughout the two days the old second hand screen print started to wear down.

    Quick tip, nail varnish works well to patch up holes but to get rid of it you need nail varnish remover and to soak the screen you might not even get it out and you may ruin your screen.

    These are some of the results, I like it simple and punny on the picnic boxes and the blanket wraps, and it didn't take to long.

Armadillo On A Skateboard

    This idea came into my mind as I was thinking of a birthday present for my Mum, I had no idea what tdo so rather than worry about it for ages I decided to draw the first thing that came into my mind, at that point my mum suggested we buy an armadillo and we could take it on walks on a skateboard. If you want to buy me an armadillo I have a skateboard.

    Yeah I know you are thinking what's wrong with a portrait or something a bit more sane, I was thinking that about halfway through and I realised why am I doing this in pencil, I didn't want to start again so I looked at the photo to see colourful graffiti over the walls but none on the floor or ceiling. I wont make up a reason for doing this other than I thought it needed a bit of colour.

    Without further adieu

    The reason the Armadillo is green is because I didn't have the right colour.

Mass Effect Earth   

 I was intending to write about the Art and Clay thing (getting a bit old) but I I was woken up and told I was going to get my teeth covered in plastic, =D after this I did not feel like typing much so I decided to draw, I couldn't find a good magazine for this week so I decided to draw some Mass Effect Art

    The photo in question is one of the details of an upcoming DCL, (two days for the UK) I have always been a fan of the futuristic art style in Mass Effect and am very excited for this DLC so it seemed like the perfect choice.

    I once again used mu sketchy style as this was more about fun than accuracy.

If you want to see more like this feel free email me or leave a comment.

munchegod@hotmail.co.uk