Have you driven a fjord lately?

So here's a couple paintings. The first one is a fjord in Norway that my mom was begging me for. I started it 4 years ago and finally finished it this past Christmas. It was one of those projects that I kept putting off. I repainted it a few times and finally settled on what you see below.




About the time I started the painting, my parents were adding on to the house. They built a very nice sun room and put in an electric fireplace. So of course my mom wanted to hang the fjord above it.

When not painting scenes of Norway, I was working on a mural at good ol' Wild Rose High School. I did it the last semester of my senior year. Somehow I never got any pictures of it, but I was visiting home this last weekend so I stopped in and snapped a couple pics.






I put in a few "I Spy" type objects in the mural. There's a faint UFO, a kite, a flower, and my biology teacher (which has been scratched off a bit) It was a lot of fun to paint.

Luke study

This was a little experiment with massive amounts of crosshatching covered with watercolors. I did it a while back, but I just found it under a stack of paintings in my painting studio. Looking back on it, I'm pretty happy with the way it was going, and I'm going to try to push this style a bit more and see what happens.

Caricatures Galore!!!

So with the splendor of spring break all done, I'm taking the moment to reflect on what a great time I had. While most of my friends were traveling the country, basking in the sun in Florida, and gettin drunk, I got to draw caricatures at the Mall of America. And I actually had a blast doing it. Anyway, above are some pictures I snapped while at Nickelodeon Universe. It wasn't all fun and games however, as soon as I got up to Minneapolis, my laptop wouldnt boot up. It was very strange and needless to say, I was quite upset. But I really can't complain all that much. This is my second Stout issued Macbook in 4 years, and I've never had any problems. Luckily I decided to back up all my artwork (which was quite a lot once I organized it) two days before it died. I did lose upwards of 3000 songs but I'm sure I'll get back there in no time.

Joaquin Phoenix... huh?

The painting III class that I'm taking this semester is rather informal, and I have a lot of freedom to do whatever I want, as long as I'm sticking to a theme, or building a specific body of work. I had been doing a lot of different things with no real method to the madness until I came up with the idea to create some sort of satirical picture book. I asked one of my former dorm buddies (who is an English minor) if he would be interested in writing some stuff for it. He said yes, and were now on our way. Below is an excerpt of our work in progress. It's a fictitious conversation between Joaquin Phoenix and his mother after his appearance on the Letterman.



Pencil roughs



I really liked how the inks turned out. I might try to color it in photoshop just to see how it turns out.



And here's the final with some of the text in place. I'm going to change the font around, and play with some other things before I really call it done, but I'll worry about all that later.

Rush Limbaugh: looks like more of a jackass in watercolor.

Here's another stab at Rush Limbaugh. I tried both scanning and photographing the picture, and both really washed out the watercolors, but this was the best I could do. I did a little touching up in photoshop, and that helped a little. I think I missed the likeness a little bit, but I may or may not redo the painting in acrylic. I really enjoyed the colors, and my painting professor sounded like he thought I should repaint it larger and in acrylic. We'll see.

More Toons

I was just talking with one of my friends over a cup of coffee about the tragically retarded AIG. I'm sure you've all heard about the record setting 62 billion dollar loss they suffered last quarter. So, I had to draw something about it. The imagery isn't all that creative or original, but all my cartoons are due tonight, so I just ran with it.

Yesterday I was reading a few articles on CNN.com and came across one about Michael Jackson and was of course intrigued. The creepy bastard is having a press conference sometime in the near future, and there were hints that he'll be having a comeback tour or something this summer. I hope I speak for everyone when I say, "Who gives a shit!?" I was never a fan of Michael Jackson's music. I won't disregard his popularity and success, he was most definitely a talented pop culture icon, but come on man, what are you doing? After all the bad press he was getting a few years back, the best thing he did was stay out of the spotlight. I think I'd survive if he took a couple more years off.

Rush Limbaugh: what a jackass

Rush Limbaugh's popularity really surprises me. I've listened to him enough times to realize an irritating amount of fallacy in almost everything he says. To me, he just comes off as an old angry jackass who's sole purpose in life is to condemn all things not GOP, typically conservative or capitalistic.