First Friday at Modern Dwellers: the Live Blog

First Friday is now on for our art show, #ArchosaursAndAutomata. The last minute rush covering previously missed details is over, and the show is completely hung up at Modern Dwellers Chocolate Lounge!

The wall of done.

Obviously, the entire internet is invited, but for those who can't make it, I'll be live blogging it as much as I can, which probably means uploading a few small movies and photographs of the exhibit, and then I'll be drawing and painting analog-style for the remainder of the evening. And possibly stuffing my face with sugary, chocolately stimulants.

Pieces include some of the work of Raven Amos from 2012, who, I think, really raised the bar this time around. Check out her work-in-progress for the show. Seeing these in person is impressive, but don't take my word for it. Since the show runs through the end of January 2013, visit and see them for yourself if you can. Raven inspires me to do better, even while I'm pushing myself though incredible self-doubt.

Trikeratos.

Other pieces are a direct link to our show from October 2011, Dinosaurs and Robots. I think I might be in the process of building a series with these pieces, and might actually plan the next one.

At left is Trikeratos, which originated in a speed painting of a Triceratops skeleton for a day in February. The background and lighting elements came much later, but I only spent a few weeks on this one. Perhaps Tron was a source of inspiration, but I tend to think of Christmas lights more than anything in particular.

A Gloom of Duralumin Dragons

These Guidracos in A Gloom of Duralumin Dragons  (thank you both Emily Willoughby and Brianne Lyons for the title) took a lot longer.  Hundreds of hours of work, not including the studies I did. They are reasonaby accurate, thanks to the critiques by Michael Habib and David Hone; but any errors in their reconstruction is my fault alone. I also took a wrong road on the background, which wasn't bad, but seemed to me to be of the wrong sort of character for the piece. (I may be wrong again, but this is the look I wanted. Hindsight is 20/20, but perception can still be flawed, and I am far too close to the problem in this case to be objective.)

I might even have the animal I want to cover picked out already for the next in the series.

I also did the show's mascot, a Clockwork Carnivore, which we used on all of our promotional materials and made into postcards:

Clockwork Carnivore in Red.

Clockwork Carnivore in Blue.

This left me two pieces into the show, compared to Raven's four. We discussed my doing something else, but sometimes, you just can't plan these things. I did two different speedpaintings, and my final piece was born and finished within sight of the last half hour of the year's end:

"Richard Basehart!"

Gypsy is a robot, after all, and qualifies as an automaton. In she goes!

And it's about that time. So off I go.

Edit: one final piece of graphic design made it in right at the last minute. It was accomplished in 2012, it does concern itself with robots, and it is the nerdiest piece I've ever done. Which might be saying something.