Booze-fueled weekend of painting

Well. The 3rd and hardest panel of my Burning Man tent is complete. Took about 25hrs of nonstop work but I think it was worth it. This is the one that will be facing the living room area and will probably be the one looked at the most so it had to be a bit more than the others.

Burning Man Tent: Space Panel

link to larger version on Deviant Art

Since there's a lot of UV in our living room lights for Burning Man, this panel is also blacklight reactive. Lots of little lights on the buildings and the planet glows and things like that.

To do this, I used a mix of creatix UV airbrush paints (which are AWESOME) and Michael's Tulip glow-in-the-dark fabric paints which SUCK! Those things are really really sticky, it's like trying to use glue. Kept jamming up my brush. Luckily, someone had just brought me a bottle of 190 everclear from out of state and I was able to thin them out with that enough to paint with them, though I still had to break down my brush every couple hours and clean it.

I'm really sort of enjoying doing big airbrushing projects like this. Physical media is really fun and there's something just really exciting/overwhelming about doing a piece this big. That planet is about a meter wide, not counting the ring. Standing next to the painting is just sort of 'wow'.

Though if I ever do big pieces like this again, I should find some way to get a set of templates made for quick masking. Like some large french curves, circle and square templates but the positives and negatives. I just cut the ones I used for this out of paper and butter bowl lids but that took time and some of them were a bit rough.

Come to think of it, I'd probably also buy all airbrush paints. I've been thinning out my heavy-body liquitex paints with airbrush medium, flow-aid, water, and everclear to make them paint. It's a LOT cheaper than using airbrush paints but is occasionally a bit of a hassle.

Heh. While I was painting this thing, I watched pretty-much every sci-fi movie in the house. Holy crap I'd forgotten how annoying Jarjar Binks was and how crappy The Phantom Menace was in general. I thought maybe I was just oversensitive to him when the movie came out because I'd had some high expectations about Star Wars or something, but no. He's just really really really annoying. Also, watching TPM back to back with Star Wars, Empire, Blade Runner, and a bunch of other good films... CG still just really isn't completely there yet. Models and matte paintings still look a lot better than CG images IMO.

Anyhow. Work!

Done

Finally done painting that bloody tent.

The last panel isn't as detailed as the previous two but it's still fairly neat for the amount of time spent on it. It's also not really viewable except under blacklight and I don't have a good way to photo it, so I can't post photos.

I was having a lot of trouble with my airbrush tonight though I cleaned it repeatedly. Don't know if it was because I was only working in fluorescent paints (which seem to be a little harder on it) or if one of the parts is finally starting to wear out.

If anyone knows much about air brushes, wouldn't mind some thoughts. It's a Badger Anthem 155. In total I've put about 300 hours on it (with about 2/3rds of that being in the past month) Seems unlikely it'd wear out so quickly, so I'm guessing it was just the paint.