More silly imagery inspired by the upcoming Day of the Dead festivities. This is the second in a run of ACEO cards that I am in the process of doing. These are quite a bit of fun to do, actually. This skeletal mariachi is ready and willing to entertain. It is always interesting to paint new subjects because you learn a lot from the preliminary research.
This little fellow has made his way out onto an Ebay auction. Click if you would like to bid : )
The following is a basic rehash of the 10.28.08 news note on the front page of Battleduck in case you missed it and are wondering what is going on with a couple of things namely, updating newer work to the site and the elusive dailies.
Howdy All!
So the blog is up and running and is rapidly becoming my favored method of communicating what is happening around here on a fairly regular basis. It certainly is expanding faster than I would have ever imagined. I would have never believed it but blogging is fun. It is, in a way, a sort of life’s journal and if one could continue and keep it running for 20 years say, you would have one terrific ‘photo album’ to go through and review!
So anyway, the updates to recent work are still waiting in the wings. I am sure y’all have noticed the new and improved Battleduck! The folks that did this work, did an amazing job and it is indeed a much needed uplift from the spartan 1852 look that I previously had. Well, those folks have gone their own ways now. I went to begin updating and found to my horror that Dreamweaver is no way near as user friendly as GoLive was. So I am floundering about at this point, unable to manage a working control of all this until I can come to grips with a pragmatic concept of tables. I expect that should not be too far down the road as I am pushing to find out how. Gee, just what I needed to do…learn a new program. Man, I really hate being dragged forward into this new and frightening century.
The good news is that I finally have managed to start posting dailies. The strange part is that I am doing it at:
http://ricksardinha.blogspot.com/
However, I am also mirroring the same imagery with more informational and nonsensical text on my blog under Near Dailies. Near Dailies is a more accurate description of what is really going on. So while Life just keeps getting her big butt in my way by waggling ever newer strange and exotic curiosities for me to explore, I ought to be able to maintain a schedule of sorts. Now it is time to go out, start a fire in the backyard and offer something good to the Art Gods that they do not let me down.
cheers,
Rick
This small oil painting was executed at Cape Cod Sand Dunes National Park. This is near Pilgrim Lake area just shortly before you enter Provincetown. The brilliancy of sunrise colors is so fleeting. It last only a few moments and begins to pale dramatically as light begins flooding the sky. Oil on birch panel, 5×7″.
Some silly imagery inspired by the upcoming Day of the Dead festivities. I plan on doing a small run of these and trying my hand out on Ebay ACEO market. Pretty small oil at 2.5×3.5″ but still took an hour and some along with wearing some pretty powerful glasses to get it done. It was actually quite a nice change of pace. I usually paint quite a bit larger which works wonders for reproduction purposes but also is so much kinder on my eyes….yep, getting old………..hehehehe.
This little fellow has made his way out onto an Ebay auction. Click if you would like to bid : )
I have begun posting dailies out at http://ricksardinha.blogspot.com/. I really should call it near dailies like it says on the banner. It seems silly with all the things I’m trying to do but it actually is helping me get things up onto the web. Whatever works. Thinking about it is just going to make it worse. I will mirror the dailies here along with a bit more information if it’s available. We shall see how it all works out. As much as I am committed to doing a painting a day, life keeps sticking out her size 12 boot and tripping me up if not just outright giving me a swift kick in the nethers. This is a small oil painting, 5×7″, executed at Cape Cod Sand Dunes National Park. This was up somewhere near Race Point. Sunrise here is really brisk not only in speed but temperature. Paper mounted on board.
This small jewel has made his way out onto an Ebay auction. Click if you would like to bid : )
Mick wanted a costume for Halloween belly-dance activities that included wings. Wings are a sort of extended customized cape with sticks or handles that allow the performer to swirl them around as she is dancing, much like a really large veil. So I sketched up an appropriately macabre zombie voodoo ghoul cool bat chick outfit.
So off we went to our very favorite local fabric mill, Lorraine’s, and started rummaging through their cutprice materials. As usual we came home with a much more than what we sought but we did get what we needed.
There is quite a bit of material in a set of wings. Taking measurements from the ones she has in her costume wardobe, they were at around 104″x 60 ” for one wing! So the material to build these must be light because that it quite bit of weight to get floating and wheeling about.
I decided to build a single long wing across the back at 120 inches plus whatever length needed for the sticks. The fabric we had was off 60″ bolts. The tension in the back would be relieved by a split to the lower back. It was fairly simple outfit with two pieces of material: one sheer black for overall effect and one for visual texture. The ends were ragged up individually by eye and then each one had a rolled hem applied, stretching the material enough to lettuce the edging. The two pieces were attached to each other with a basting stitch with intermittent back-stitching for reinforcement. Arrow shafts are just dowel rods so I used a couple of old defunct ones I had. They were cut, shaped, painted and ended up being just at 27 inches. These got encased within the sheer material.
All in all, it was relatively easy to make, cheap and works quite well as the pictures show. They look rather spooky and reminiscent of a death shroud in the wind. Mick has already used them at some shows this season with success and has had some offers for them but she is not quite done with them yet.
Back in May of this year, I received a commission from a fellow named Scott Andrews. He wanted me to paint one of my very favorite subject matters: ruins. It was for the cover of the very first issue of a new e-zine called Beneath Ceaseless Skies which publishes literary adventure fantasy with a traditional or classic fantasy feel. I did the piece up and asked him to let me know when he got the site up and running. Well apparently the time is now. Congratulations and good luck on all that hard work, Scott!! To see the cover and perhaps read some fantasy, simply go to Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
The cover only uses a piece of the painting. To see the entire piece click http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/images/artwork/full_size/3.jpg. Once there, hover the mouse in the bottom right corner and click on the icon that appears for an even larger view.
If the link fails to work for you then click on the blurb about the artwork that is on the left side of the cover. Once on the next page, click again on the thumbnail of the entire image and it will load up a large format of the entire painting. Hope you like it!
Below is a version with a large crane in the mid-ground. This piece is entirely a digital creation.
What an appropriate time of the year to have something come back to haunt you. Back in October 2006, I was commissioned to do a series of conceptual art for key scenes in a future movie. It was to be called The Dead Matter and would be produced by Midnight Syndicate Films. Midnight Syndicate already produces the most wonderful instrumental CD’s to listen to and to paint by. They have spooky vampire music to paint graveyard scenes and inspiring battle music on their Dungeons & Dragons CD’s. These soundtracks are great stuff and worth giving a listen to.
Anyway back to the movie. It is rapidly approaching release and the ‘The Dead Matter’ trailer is now online at http://www.t3nth1rtyone.com/. The IMDB page is at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1055363/where it lists all the cast and crew as well as hosting a message board for your comments. Tom Savini and Andrew Divoff are only two of the notables playing in this film!
Except for a small stint earlier in the spring when I planted some tomato plants, the garden has lain idle for the past two years. Those tomato plants suffered the wrath of a surprise spring hurricane named Hurricane Mojo. It tore through our yard, bulldozed down the protective fencing and yanked the plants out of the ground spreading them with great abandon throughout the yard.
With this small disaster added to finishing waterproofing the cellar and the broc sett, gardening has bypassed me once again. Except for the eventualities of mowing, weeding and such. Yea. Hooray.
A friendly SCA lady down the road was thinning her strawberry patch which she had christened ” The Urban Sprawl ” and put out the call to any who wanted her cullings. I promptly volunteered, got a bunch and had them in the ground the next morning.
The photo is 3 days later and it looks like they may very well take. Rumors of a return of Hurricane Mojo are always about but he has yet to appear. So I might very well get to keep these plants afterall. Many thanks to Vibeke Twigsplitter. You are a peach, girl.