Booze-fueled weekend of painting

[pasithea]

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!

Comments

[paka.livejournal.com]

That's seriously kick-ass! It has a lot of the aesthetic of some of the cities in Samurai Jack.

I should bring over my copy of the concept art book for The Phantom Menace. There's the equivalent of five movies worth of art in there and almost all of it is better than what they wound up making. What really gets me is that Jar-Jar is a pretty solid design for a screwball comic relief character, and the animation is pretty good too, so where the whole thing failed was the writing.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

I knew you'd like this one. :)

Heh. I went through about a dozen design drawings for this particular one. I was doing a whole bunch of different layouts. Then when I got the raw tie-dyed cloth up on the wall, it inspired me to do this (which was radically different from what I'd been planning to do)

The larger foreground towers were actually part of the original tie-dye pattern. I'd tried to gradate the cloth from top to bottom dark blue to light, then introduce some purple as well. Because of the particular way I folded it, the purple gave me these weird vertical columns and sort of a ghostly positive-image face of the little alien boy.

The airbrush is also just naturally good for doing a thick hazy atmosphere. You just spray lighter and further from the canvas to make background items. Gives an incredible sense of depth really easily.

Now I'm wondering if I shouldn't invest in an airbrush tool for my wacom tablet. Though I was also really enjoying doing big full-arm strokes in making a lot of this.

Heh. The planet is actually strategically placed. I'm painting these on the wall in the living room and because I needed to do a lot of strokes at an angle for the atmosphere of the gas giant, I was standing on the staircase to work. Much of the time I was hanging onto the banister with my left hand and swinging my whole body to get a smooth even line on the planet. Rather aerobic painting.

There are also a few of the large fill areas (like the big ships on the right) where I got tired and painted left handed for a while. I think I kind of liked that about this project too. I wasn't just painting, I was also getting a full-body workout.

[paradox-puree.livejournal.com]

oooooh.

Now that is AWESOME.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

Looks really cool. :) You should start thinking about where in your apartment you're going to hang these after your trip.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I could stand looking at that much of my own art on a regular basis. Especially work that I'm now rushing to complete after being sick. Taking a lot of shortcuts.

[zeeth_kyrah]

Perhaps you could sell or auction the panels? In any case, this whole project is awesome.