The Rainbow Salesman

I was thinking about all the opportunistic umbrella salesman who appear - seemingly out of nowhere - to dispense their inventory at the sight of rain. But what about the rainbows? You didn't think they got there by themselves, did you? Enter 'The Rainbow Co.' who deploy their salespeople to rain swept communities desiring post rain atmospheric aesthetics. LOOK at that smug smile, double bounce strut and go-get-em attitude! Where some people see rain drops, HE SEES dollar signs! Now get out there 'an sell!

'The Rainbow Salesman'
acrylic on wood panel
8"x10"
$ for sale

THAT LAUGH! - collection photo

 Pret-ty cool! My painting 'THAT LAUGH!', hanging in it's new home! (And yes, that's a Warhol on the left and Basquait on the right!)

Dollars & Snakes - more progress

Here's more of the progress from my new painting 'Dollars & Snakes' inspired by the movie 'The Big Short'. The original will be exhibited at the upcoming YES Montreal hosted Business Skills for Creative Souls conference: http://yesmontreal.ca/en/artists/events/yes-arts-conference-expo

Celestial Hands

I'm working to wrap up one last painting for The ArtistProject (now just 2 weeks away!). This painting is called 'Celestial Hands'. It is an alternate narrative on why cartoon characters wear gloves. 

My favorite reference to this is from Bobby in 'An ExtremelyGoofy Movie':

New business card

My new business card. People are always telling me "You gotta SELL YOURSELF!" and "People don't just buy the art, they buy the artist"...
(The back of the card has an image of my work along with my website, E-mail, etc...)

Timing Charts - all done!

'Timing Charts' - one of the new paintings I created for the upcoming The Artist Project Toronto next month is now complete and will be for sale. (Acrylic on wood panel, 20"x16".) Animation friends and fans will likely get the reference of the painting's title and iconography in the right hand corner.

                                                            "What are timing charts??"

Here's a great video I found by Echo Bridge that explains them and their use.

 See you in Toronto in 4 short weeks!

2015 in review

2015: what a year! THANK YOU so much everyone, for all your support over this past year! Here is 2015 in review via paintings completed. Looking forward to an exciting and productive 2016!

A word about Aspect Ratio

Knowing what size you are going to make your paintings before you begin is tremendously helpful. By knowing this, you can now be exact with your composition. 

There is something called Aspect Ratio most commonly used to determine screen dimensions in broadcast media (TV, cinema films, YouTube...).  Aspect Ratio is that notice you used to see on VHS tapes stating 'this film has been formatted to fit your screen'.

The aspect ratio of the drawing for the painting above (inside the grey rectangle) is 20:16 = 20"x16" (Examples of aspect ratios of different dimensions, but the same proportions would be 5:4, 10:8, and 1:0.8)

 

By knowing this, you can create a shape in those dimensions and account for all the space used in your composition. The advantage is: when you blow up the drawing (via photocopier to transfer it to your painting surface) you won't have negative space in your painting surface that you did not account for. (see below)

I like scanning the drawing, bringing it into a digital coloring program and placing a shape over it in the dimensions of the final painting. You can always move around that shape and angle it so the drawing fits in the most interesting way. 

Then, print out that image at a manageable size to tighten up the drawing (above). Although the shape is less than the final dimensions, you know that when you scale it up, it will be EXACTLY the size you want.  There are many  print places where you can do large format printing (anything beyond 12"x18"). You can get your image printed out at the scale you want (in this case, 20"x16").