Cocaine Napalm Beach Party

Nothing like a serene picture of a pleasant party on the beach to shake you out of the winter blahs. I tired to fix a lot of the drawing mistakes with this painting but it's far from perfect. This whole painting/monoprint schtick started in a really weird roundabout way. I was trying to do some ultra slick genre stuff by ripping off Frank Quitely. Who is one of the best storytelling artists around:




Some of that stuff is archived on here and you can see that my mimicry was a miserable failure. I typically work on way too many things at once so it got shoved to the back burner when I started working on other sutff. A friend of mine told me it was some of the best stuff he'd seen me do, so I tried to do some Fine ART with it. I made some line drawings and screen printed them on etching paper. I started watercoloring them which wasn't really satisfying on it's own, even with the Old Holland brand paints which are a bit thicker and have better pigments than the other brands. I started spray varnishing them to seal it so I could glaze more colors over the surface. I start with a couple of layers of acrylic and then move onto some heavy enamel oil glazes. It's a real roundabout way of doing things but It's seems to be a good way form me to keep the thin cartooning lines that I'm enamored with and still layer on the color and contrast with the glazing. I've ended up starting a lot of these things The same way Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac did, by treating the paper with lifting preparation solution and applying a base color. A nice trick to give the painting an overall color temperature/mood.




First two are Dulac and the third is Rackham. Probably not very bright of me to include those pictures along with mine as I will suffer greatly by comparison. They used line to "lock" the registration of the colors when they were printed, I like it aesthetically, but I wonder if they only used it out of necessity or if they would have abandoned it if the printing technology was better.

I've got at least 7 to ten things started and halfway finished. It seeming like lately as soon as I get the idea roughed out I have a hard time staying interested in finishing it after I am forced away form it by important things like returning work e-mails and other boring madness. If you made it all the way through this odd rambling, contact me and I will send you a prize.