Shields and Spears Art Show Video Promo!

Hey, this is a thing!

Shields and Spears: Art Show

So it's been more than a year since I last updated this space. The last time was for a show. And this time?

Poster/Flyer for our show!

A new show by Raven Amos, myself, and Zach Miller! (To be honest, I update often enough elsewhere, so it seems sort of redundant to come here every time. But here I am.)

And so the details: First Friday is on the 3rd of October 2014, and we'll be there. But the show runs throughout the month, and I'll update this space with a few more photos after the hanging. Shields and Spears: the Ceratopsid Dinosaurs at the Yak and Yeti Café location (next to Title Wave in midtown Anchorage, Alaska). Pieces will be available for sale for the duration, and some extra stuff will be available at our table during First Friday.

Well, we're still painting for the show as of this writing, so I must be brief so I can get back to my work. There's a Facebook page for those who do such things, or if you want to scan one of those code thingies with your phone or tablet, go ahead:

Hi. I link to a Facebook events page.

One more thing: there are still some free postcards available for the receiving, if you'd care to own a piece of mailed ephemera:

(Cf. cgfx.us/contact for e-mail.)

Edit (19 September 2014): our show has been mentioned over at Symbiartic (a Scientific American blog). Check it out!

Edit (3 October 2014): our show now has a video promoting the event!

Archosaurs and Robots Show in Homer, Alaska

Out next show is set to go up in April, and we'll be present for the first Friday on the 5th of April, so if you're in town, you can see us there! We may even be talkative.

Archosaurs & Robots.

Errata at the @adndotcom:

That is, the Anchorage Daily News: Modern Dwellers, is, in fact, located in Midtown, not downtown Anchorage.

Here's their website: http://www.moderndwellers.com/ —this may be another case of Google Maps simply not being accurate (this happens quite a lot, in my experience) and being used to fact-check.

And the name of Raven's piece is Swamp Dragon.

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.

The Last Painting of 2012

And the last painting for the #ArchosaursAndRobots art show:

Gypsy elocuting Richard Basehart!

This image was made from two speedpaintings: this study and this other study, and with the new background I probably put a total of about eight hours into it.

As I type this, Friday is just a few days away. If you're in the Anchorage area and headed to Modern Dwellers, I may see you in the evening. I'll be the one standing next to his fiancée, trying to look like I belong there.

Be seeing you.

My Previous Post on this Image Was "I'm Done."

That turned out to be wrong. Very.

Three days later, I repainted the background, almost completely, and by the time I uploaded my file to be printed, I was utterly drained and exhausted. But here's the result, a piece more in character with its prequel, Trikeratos:

Finished. I swear.

But if there's any interest, I may offer the (slightly) older piece as a digital print. It was a lot of work just to come to realize where and how I'd gone awry:

Still good. But not good enough.

Someday I'll relate the full tale of how I saved Xmas with this repaint. But not today. I've got a lot to do before the beginning of next month.