Amanita print.

Not sure if I posted about this painting on here when I first did it, but it's my first finished watercolour painting of an Amanita muscaria mushroom, and Shaun and I have just made prints of it. You can read more about it and order them from our paypal store over at Lepus Luna. 

Painting and cats.

Trying hard to get these cat paintings done, but Monty seems determined to get in the way.

 

So far I have outlined three of these and haven’t ruined any of them, which is a good start…although I did have a near miss last weekend when I stood up after painting for a while and discovered that the end of my plait had been resting in a pot of black ink.  I’ll just add that to my long list of stuff not to do, along with keeping spray bottles of coffee lying around.

While I’m on the subject of painting though, I’m going to indulge in a post about materials that most of you will find boring. But it’s really cold and wet outside, and I have so much trouble finding the right stuff to paint with that I feel compelled to share it when I find something great; and I have actually found a few things lately that make my life as a painter a lot easier.

Firstly, any of you who work with paper will know that masking tape which claims to be ‘low tack’ is very rarely useful. Either it peels half your paper off with it after you’ve spent hours on a painting, or it’s so low-tack that paint seeps under areas that you were trying to mask. So I recently splurged on a roll of $20 masking tape, recommended to me by the nice lady at the art suppliers, and I am super glad that I did. The blue stuff you can see in the photo above is a brand called hyStik, and as you can see from their website, these guys are serious about masking tape. I bought the long-lasting one, which means I can stick my painting down with it and leave it there for 14 days before the tape starts getting harder to peel off. So far every time I’ve used it I’ve been able to get it off easily, with no paper tears or sticky residue, and all the edges I’ve masked with it have been perfectly clean. This in particular is of vital importance to me because of the paintings I do where certain parts of the image extend beyond the masked edge, like the wolfsbane piece I did recently:

Another thing I’m pleased with having found recently are brushes with ergonomic handles. One of the things I found incredibly frustrating over my one-month painting holiday was that after a certain period of painting or drawing, my hand was so sore, and particularly my thumb and middle finger where the brush/pencil rests, that I was constantly forced to stop and let it recover. Even layers of band-aids on both my fingers and the brushes are not enough to prevent this from happening, because I like doing work with loads of tiny details and have to use the smallest brushes, which also generally have the thinnest handles.

SO, I went hunting on the internet for brushes with fat handles, having seen some before in a similar post to this on the rather excellent Wandering Genie, and after hours of searching I found some. This picture is of larger brushes, but the handle on the 000 brush I bought is the same size.

Within Australia, these Roymac Purity bruishes are the only ones I can find (which is fine because Roymac make good brushes), but on Dick Blick in America I managed to find several brands that make a range of wide-handled brushes, mostly for detailing. I ordered a bunch of different ones that haven’t arrived yet, but they look excellent. The ones I’m most excited about are these:

The brand is Robert Simmons Expression Series, and these spotter brushes are smaller than any brushes I’ve found in Australia. They’re also a hell of a lot cheaper, like most things in the States, but the cost of having them shipped here cancels that out somewhat. So far the work I’ve done with the Roymacs has been far more comfortable so I’m looking forward to getting these.

Also making my life way easier these days is Saral Graphite Transfer Paper, which I only recently discovered:

Until now I have been using a glass-top table from Ikea with a desk-lamp underneath it to trace images onto my painting paper, and when I’m using toned paper or really thick card it doesn’t work well at all. For anyone who hasn’t used it, this stuff is re-usable and comes in a roll, so you can cut a piece that fits your paper and just trace right over the top of it. I’ve been using computer print-outs of the line drawing and tracing it though with a ball-point pen. The greatest benefit of doing things this way is that you’re not actually placing a pencil on the paper, and therefore avoiding the tiny grooves and scratches they cause on the surface, which annoyingly show up after putting colour down or rubbing something out.

I also just bought some stuff called Mask-It, similar to what Americans know as Friskit, which is a masking film for use with airbrushes and the like. Apparently it won’t damage paper and is useful for watercolour painting too. I haven’t tried it yet, but have some bits on these new cat paintings that I plan to mask out, so intend to try it in the next few weeks. 

If this doesn’t work though, I learned a good way to apply large areas of masking fluid from my botanical drawing teacher, which is to apply it with one of those rubber-tipped paint shaper thingies you can buy:

Anyone who has ever accidentally dipped an expensive brush into masking fluid will understand why it’s important to use one made of rubber, not hair.

So now that’s all off my chest,  I guess I’d better go do some painting. I have some technique/materials tips for graphite drawing that I might share down the track some times as well, if anyone finds this stuff useful. I’m always happy to share whatever knowledge I have with people who would like to know how I achieve certain effects in my work, and appreciate it when others do the same. The importance of good materials and knowledge of how to use them cannot be emphasized enough when it comes to painting and drawing, at least in my experience.

La Louve

Shaun took a better photo of this for me last night. Prints should be available soon, when I get my shit together.

Art Sabbatical

So I've been away for a little while, having just taken a month off from tattooing so I'd have an opportunity to work on my personal art for a bit, and I was hoping to return with all sorts of new achievements and some personal paintings to show off. Frustratingly, my art sabbatical didn't quite go as planned, and despite the fact that I did nothing for a whole month other than sit in my little 'office' and draw/paint/read/take notes, I actually accomplished very little; most of the drawings I did are now filling up my recycling bin. All I really have to show for that time, aside from a notebook full of ideas that are primarily still half-baked, are three pieces, two of which were in the works before I took my break. The first piece I finished was a coloured pencil  illustration of my belly dance teacher Melusina, which she intends to use for a new business card and website:

While I am actually happy with how this turned out, the process of creating it was an epic disaster from start to finish, and it ate up an entire week of my break as a result. This image was in fact my third attempt, because I started two before it that both failed for various reasons, the main one being the paper I used. I won't go into a boring rant about art paper here because it's really not very interesting, but I will say that I have now learned a few painful lessons about the importance of choosing the right paper for my art work, and this drawing was the first. The second lesson was delivered during the final stages of the next piece I completed, which was another Amanita Muscaria mushroom:

You can't actually tell from this photo, but the paper in all the dark areas around the cap of the mushroom is torn to little shreds due to the paper being too soft for intensive pencil work. It's not a complete disaster because it's only by looking at the original in direct light that it shows - but it's still a massive bummer after 20+ hours of work, and it renders the original unsuitable for exhibiting. From now on, no matter what anybody tells me, I shall refuse to draw on anything less than Arches cotton rag watercolour paper - the only paper I've ever been truly happy with, and seemingly the only one that can withstand all the layers of burnishing and erasing required for this kind of pencil work. This is the kind of stuff that makes me wish I'd gone to art school, so maybe I'd know what the hell I'm doing.

So just in case those previous disasters weren't enough, I also ruined probably the best drawing I've ever done, and one that my botanical drawing teacher was hoping I would exhibit next year:

That stain there is coffee that dripped from a spray bottle I use for doing coffee washes on my paintings, and in all likelihood, it's never coming off. Be very glad you weren't all here to see the sad, teary tantrum I threw when I discovered that this had happened. I swear there's some kind of curse attached to my artwork because this kind of thing seems to happen to just about everything I do. Over the course of many years I've had art stolen, water damaged while in a gallery,  pissed on by my cat, and thrown in the bin (thanks Mum) along with all the indignities I seem determined to subject it to. Sometimes I think it's remarkable that I even persist with making it.

So anyway, as for my third accomplishment, that didn't quite go as planned either...but I've grown to expect that now so it wasn't such a big deal. I actually feel ok with how this one came up in the end, and the only real issue I had was due to an experiment I tried with using a sepia toned black ink rather than straight black.

(I'll get a better photo of this soon.) For this sort of work I always outline and shade the whole painting with varying dilutions of indian ink, then paint over that with watercolour; I thought using sepia would give the whole image a sort of subtle warmth, but in reality it just muddied the colours and meant I had to paint over a few bits with opaque ink, which is kind-of a no-no in watercolour painting. But who gives a shit, right?

This is the first in a series of paintings I'm working on that are based on poisonous/healing/visionary plants and the folklore surrounding them. Some of you nerds out there (I'm looking at you, Jeanne) will recognise these flowers as Wolfsbane, more commonly known as Monkshood, which is one of the most poisonous plants in the world. The mythology surrounding Wolfsbane includes everything from people using it to kill wolves, to people using it to protect themselves from werewolves, and most excitingly to me, people using it to become werewolves. The idea that witches practised lycanthropy by donning wolfskins and employing toxins from magical plants may seem far-fetched, but it's certainly a more interesting and inspiring reality than the one I encounter most days, so I'm choosing to indulge in it.

Aside from this excellent book I've been reading, I think some of my love for themes of this kind comes from one of my all-time favourite movies, Altered States, in which the main character experiments with altered states using psychedelics and isolation tanks. In one particularly memorable scene, he reverts back to a primitive being and breaks into the local zoo where he kills and eats an animal with his bare hands. For the uninitiated:



Ken Russell is fucking awesome.

So aside from doing the above pieces, I also started a series of drawings for another new series based on cats, sketched out some ideas for a potential folklore-themed flash set, received this extremely beautiful Austin Spare print from Shaun for my 30th birthday, and became infatuated with the Legendary Pink Dots. Some more stuff has happened since then, but it can wait for another post.

Chapel Tattoo sideshow poster.

Exactly a year ago, when I had my annual break over Christmas in which I attempt to make as much art as possible, I started work on this painting but totally fucked it up. I spent enough time on the sketch though that I didn't want to give up completely...so this year I tried again with a little more success. This was a gift for everyone I work with at Chapel - a great big thank-you to Jane, Kate and Andrew for giving me my dream job, and to all the other lovely people I get to hang out with every day who make my working life enjoyable.

(click to enlarge)

It's been too long since I drew this for me to remember why I chose to make it a sideshow poster, but it was super fun anyway... I did it mostly in Indian ink and watercolour, with some coloured pencil over the top in places.  Thanks again you guys, I love ya guts.

The Face of Glory

This is an image I've felt strongly about for a long time and have always wanted to draw or paint, so last year I finally got around to it. The Face of Glory, or Kirtimukha, is an image commonly carved or painted over the doors of Indian temples, but it appears in various forms throughout Eastern religious artwork. For a description of and commentary on this image that far surpasses anything I could write, see the extract from Joseph Campbell's 'Myths To Live By' here.

I'm rather fascinated by concepts of life feeding on life, and the relationship between creation, preservation and destruction (or sex, life and death) that is so often beautifully described in Indian art. I painted this for Jakob, my good friend and fellow artist at Chapel Tattoo, in exchange for some beautiful conch shells he inked on my chest. Thanks pal.

Odalisque

I did this painting last year for an exhibition called 'Skins and Sharpies' which was held at the Per Square Metre gallery here in Melbourne (click to enlarge). It's the first of many paintings I have planned that are based around a vague Orientalist theme, mainly inspired by my love of bellydancing. Like most of my paintings it was done with Indian ink and watercolours and is available for purchase. Giclee prints are also available for $100 in a limited run of 50. Email me here if interested.

Lovely Men.

Some portraits I painted a few years ago of people I admire. Ok, men I admire. I like men ok?

One of these days I'd like to do some more of these paintings. So many men, so little time.

Reaper

I did this painting a while ago, I think it was late 2007, for an exhibition I held in early 2008. Basically I had been tattooing non-stop for 3 years since starting my apprenticeship and hadn't really had a break, and I was pretty much going insane. Aside from the fact that learning to tattoo is stressful, I was just drawing day in day out and spending the best part of my week in the shop, and I started to lose touch with every other aspect of my life. I hardly saw Shaun and when I did I was tired and miserable, and I rarely drew or made art for the fun of it, since I spent so much time drawing for clients.

As someone who's been making art since I was old enough to hold a pencil, it was somewhat depressing for me that art had been reduced to something I did for money; tattooing was exactly what I wanted to do, no question  there, but I still felt I needed to have a separate outlet for a more personal means of expression. So I decided to take a month off work and bust out a whole lot of paintings, and this was one of them (click to enlarge). I did 15 in total that month, although not all of them ended up in the exhibition.

As you can see from the progress pictures below, the scythe and hood were supposed to be smooth and shiny, not spattered with blood, and I spent hours painstakingly perfecting those blends...but then I came home from a Captain Cleanoff gig after having a few and ruined it by painting the background in without masking the foreground properly. The moral of the story; don't drink and paint, kids!

Despite this mistake, I'm pleased with how the painting turned out. The original is available to purchase and giclee prints can be made to order for $100. Email me here if interested.