Easter 2024 - Peace

May this Easter Day bring you much Peace, Joy, & Love!

You disappoint me rat.

Did this one last night, this was a lot of fun. Just looked over at my cat and this image started giving birth in my head. Hated it at first when I started with the cat's head, but keep on with it and I think it turned out pretty cool. It's the art you start and don't like that you end up loving if you keep going.

Red & black & blobs of thoughts

Random scribbles on my phone with a free art & drawing app.

March '24 art dump

A few more random, quick & experimental pieces of this month of March. Second from the top is an old piece but I just messed with the colors and contrast a bit to see how it would play on social media.

1. "Window from a dream" Digital/Photoshop. I love how this one turned out, this was actually inspired from a dream I had as a kid. I wanna do some prints of this one. 2. "This ain't what I ordered" Hand drawn, an older work. 3. "Life plan Vol. 1" Digital/Photoshop. I like the individual elements, but don't like how it turned out overall. 4. "When I throw my sweat pants on the floor, they look at me" Digital/Photoshop. Happy with it but wish I would have used some different more contrasting colors. I saw it in my head in these colors.

Flock

A little thumbnail sketch from a long time ago just hanging out waiting to do something more with. Finally got around to doing a tighter Photoshop digital painting of this sketch. It's not a very big file but I would like to do a risoprint small run of this at some point. Four colors.

Endure & Live

One of my most favorite places on earth is downtown Frankenmuth, Michigan. It's a small little antique German Bavarian tourist spot; very quaint, very cheesy, but to me, very relaxing. I don't know why, I'm a dork... Frankenmuth is about an hour away from where I live and I will go there about once a year with the family. Every time we visit, we always eat at Zehnder's Restaurant. Well, over the years going with my kids, nieces & nephews; they would always order the children's ice cream for desert, which would come with a beautiful little vibrant colored plastic animal (as seen above in the third picture). Well, from many visits over the years, I have quite the collection of the little critters, and I love them. For some weird reason, they are all animals and then mermaids (of course my favorite, duh!). Anyway, not to drag this out, I was taking photos of some of the mermaid ones I had and messing around to do something artsy and the above self love, motivational image occurred. Be good to yourself.

If your interested to know more about Zehnder's Restaurant you can visit their website here: https://www.zehnders.com/zehnders-restaurant/

Legless Mermaid promo videos

I have been making some simple self promo gifs/videos to use on social media and the web using the free version of Canva. Gotta say, it's easy and a lot of fun! This platform Blogger doesn't play well with videos, so here are some still shots of a couple I have made. The first one is order up; It's a photo from the kitchen of a local restaurant I work part time at. A still shot with "order up" fading in and out, and the background sound of a diner with people chatting and dishes clanking. The other is a stock video from the web of a vintage tv with static fuzz & background noise and the logo pops in and out from the bottom of the screen.

Check them out here: https://www.instagram.com/leglessmermaid

Power Play

So there was an art contest here in Detroit, for our beloved Red Wings. The theme was "Power Play". Big cash prize, winning art to be put in a corporate suite at the stadium, and so on, and so on...I'm not a big sports fan, but I know art and I need money! I've won big contests before thinking way outside the box and not doing what is obvious or expected. But this time it just didn't pan out, my art piece didn't even place. The winning art, it was good, but it was also what you would expect. But it's ok, actually doing this exercise grounded me, and taught me many lessons that I needed to be re-taught. 1. Think through your production process. I decided and visualized this in my head as very clean and graphic. So I used spray paint to create this, which needs masks. I was rushing and on a tight budget so I just told myself I would use paper prints and wing the offsets and overlaps of each color. I also haven't done this type of masking and painting in years, so I was rusty, the paper was too thin and buckled up when loaded with heavy paint, and I was way off on aligning colors to butt up cleanly. A lot of mistakes. 2. Know your audience. The judges were corporate executives and sports fans, they are not gonna overthink art or creative abstraction (think players on ice, local Detroit landmark icons). 3. Politics. Don't put a determined cartoon face on our logo, what is creative license? 4. Maybe they just didn't like it? Either way, I learned some lessons and will be a wiser artist the next time I enter a contest.

First pic is the digital concept. The second pic is the finished painted piece (24" x 30" spray paint and acrylic on wood panel). Third pic is some production shots.