The Idea Jar

I now present Emily’s birthday present for 2012. Not quite as large as last year’s but still respectable.

I started off with a 3 foot by 4 foot canvas and applied my spackled texture. Then proceeded on to the underpainting of paint pencils and crayons.From there I shot up the line work with my projector and positioned it on the canvas. I then finished it off with a combination of acrylic and charcoal pencil.

As you can see, it now has a home above our bed. It serves as an excellent dream catcher. Lately I’ve been able to replace nightmares involving Kristen Stewart films with fanciful dreams of anthropomorphic peanut butter sandwiches.

Series

The hardest part of posting is resisting the urge to start of with “Here is….” every time I begin to write. Now that the first sentence is out of the way, here it goes.

This is a portrait series project I completed back in 2006. It was part of my Freshman year Color Concepts class. The project requirements were to create 4 self portraits, beginning with a charcoal manikin study, a painterly portrait using a full palette, a stylized high chroma portrait, and finally a portrait based on the style and palette of an established artist (Henri Matisse).

 

Happy Birthday Little Bro

Yesterday was my youngest brother Collin’s 19th birthday. In honor, I passed on this mixed media piece. I originally created it for a Figure Drawing class during my Sophomore year at CCAD.

Collin and our other brother Cody helped me out endlessly during my stint at CCAD. I thank you guys a ton.

Happy Birthday little bro.

Thunder Bark

Yet another classic Kyle project. Just when I take 2 steps forward, I almost put the claw of a hammer through the canvas. All is well now, finished and on the wall.

I call the piece Thunder Bark and the photo above doesn’t do it justice. It is a combination of acrylic, ink, and metallic spray paint on canvas. Feel free to come on over to the crib to check it out.

Another Found Limb

 

 

Finally, my Found Foot has a wall brother. This severed hand is acrylic on canvas. I wrapped it up on Sunday, just in time for Halloween on Monday.

We are starting to run out of wall space in our apartment. It feels great, and I’m not stopping.

 

 

Swiminnn

To continue on my accidental theme of animal posts as of late, here is a piece called Swiminn. He’s a sea turtle, just doin’ his thing.

For this I used a combination of  acrylic, watercolor, and ink, on watercolor paper. I also refinished the frame you see here. It was originally this distressed cream mess. I cleaned it up, found there was beautiful wood underneath, and stained it.

Now go outside while you still can.

HOOT!?, the Follow Up

So here she is, finally hanging on our wall. It wasn’t an easy process (none of the projects I get my self into ever are), but HOOT!? is on the wall. Just in time for Emily’s birthday. Sike!

Larry David’s Floating Head

Here is an illustration completed during my Sophomore year at CCAD. The project involved creating an illustrated magazine cover. In the end I wasn’t really happy with the end result of the cover, but I’ve always really liked the illustration.

If you don’t know who the floating head is, it is Larry David. The co-creator of Seinfeld, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

I thought the most fitting way to capture the essence of LD was to go surrealist route ala Magritte with his smirking, floating head. If you are familiar with is work I think this makes make sense.

 

 

Sassy In Disguise

Sasquatch exists. He works in Insight Communications’ customer service department. You’ve seen him around, in line at the movies, filling up his Toyota Tercel, and in the back of your local mexican restaurant slamming taquitos.  You’ve just never noticed because he wears a disguise. You can always tell if it’s him, because his disguise glows in the dark.

Sassy In Disguise has been a long time coming. Anymore, I feel like I start more projects than I finish. It feels good to finally cross something of the list.

This piece is a combination of oil based inks, gesso, and glow-in-the-dark acrylic, on watercolor paper.

I apologize that I couldn’t get a decent shot of his disguise glowing in the dark. I didn’t have the patience to set up for the shot.

Here is a picture of it framed. The color is a little more accurate in this one.

HOOT!?

 

It’s that time of the year again. Time for Emily’s birthday present. And this year it is bigger than ever, 6 foot by 4 foot to be exact.

As with all birthday gifts, I try to keep them a surprise. But with this one, it proved to be too frustrating to do so in our modest apartment.

It all started with an original sketch of an owl I did that she liked a lot. She had also been saying how she wanted some artwork to fill some of the bigger empty spaces on our walls. I had been wanting to do some bigger works recently and this seemed to be the perfect thing.

I went to the Hardware store and bought an 8 foot by 4 foot sheet of hardwood plywood. I had it cut down to 6’X4′ and stained it light blue using a combination of oil paints and thinners. From there I created 3 cardboard stencils and hit them with a little white spray paint. Since I started with a finalized digital version I took the line work printed it on transparency and shot it on the board. With the line work laid out I went to town filling the rest in with acrylic and gouache combinations. Once all the color and line work was done I coated the entire thing in an acrylic gloss.

For never having worked so large, everything went quite smoothly. Now I just have to go about mounting it to the wall above our couch. Wish me luck.

Special thanks to my littlest bro Collin for the help with the stencil work.

Happy Birthday Emily!