April is a cruel month, but it was a busy month for me in the Studio! Here is a recap of most of the art I made this month.
I had a blast conducting a livestream on instagram where I made a painting of Mt. Elbert. I've started to paint Mt. Elbert over and over again. What is funny about Mt. Elbert in Colorado is at first, it doesn't seem like a majestic mountain. It has none of the fame of the Maroon Bells or Pikes Peak, but it is the highest mountain in Colorado - this is why I like it so much!
Here is the painting I came out with while livestreaming - I think it turned out pretty good! It is tough to paint and hold a phone in your other hand, but fun!
Along with paintings of Mt. Elbert, I have worked on a couple versions of a painting of this mountain pond - Notch Lake. Here is a version of Notch Lake on aluminum:
Here is another view:
All of my mountain and Leadville-related paintings will be available at HarperRose Studios in Leadville. You can check out their website here: http://www.harper-rose.com/ . What I like most about HarperRose is that they have brought modern and beautiful artwork to Leadville - a place which isn't always known for being on the vanguard of modernity! (We love Leadville no matter what though)
Lots of mountains were painted, and ... the Chrono Trigger World Map
I took a stab at painting the opening world map of Chrono Trigger again - this version turned out to be pretty good! It is hard to make game screens from the SNES era interesting as paintings - the direct way to make them interesting would be to paint them pixel-by-pixel, but hyperrealism is just too boring, too obvious for me - so I made the map into a more expressive work. Chrono Trigger and Myst are two games where I seem to like to paint the landscapes - for Myst I suppose there is nothing to paint but the landscape. For Chrono Trigger - something about the world maps just seem so delicately, deliberately done. They probably feel this way because the whole game was done so well.
After making the above self portait on canvas, I started up the same self portrait below on encaustic board:
The portrait overall isn't quite done yet, but I'll post the full thing when it is wrapped up! After this self portrait I will move into working on portraits of friends or family. Sometimes the self portrait isn't a modality of narcissism, it is just a low-risk way to practice! If I make my nose too big or ugly I won't be upset, but someone else might be upset if I paint their nose incorrectly, ha, ha!
I've been working with oil paints for about three years now. I don't think I will ever go back to acrylics. Even in making large abstract works where representing skin or water isn't important, I'll probably stick with oils. Oils are kind of a pain and are tough to clean, but they're worth it. I can see why the oil vs. acrylic question causes a lot of strong feelings amongst artists.
On the other side of the studio, I am still working on my comic, Tilted Sun! It has really turned into more of a longform sequential work at this point. There is no way it would look good or make sense as an issue-by-issue piece of art - it would need to go into a full volume of something like 100-200 pages. Anyhow! I will call you when I finish it in a few years... :)
Workin on the comic in public, like ya do
While I have a website set up for Tilted Sun, the best places to follow my progress on it are Twitter or Instagram. Basically if anything in the stream of drawings that I post to do with Tilted Sun, the Tilted Sun account will retweet it or post it.
It's still pretty hard to say what Tilted Sun is about. I guess everyone will find out!