Sandy Springs Turtle

In 2005 I was roped into painting this turtle for the city of Sandy Springs in their efforts to rally support to become their own city.  The design was a couple pencil drawings by a elementary age girl.  I just painted her ideas all on the turtle.  Erin also helped and I think so did Cidne, Erin's sister.

Lovely.

The funny thing is, after the turtles were all done, they had a parade, and we had to pull the dumb thing up a hill.  It was insanely heavy and had a rope to pull it that was too short, making the dang thing cut into our feet all the time.  It was very awkward and stupid.  But Now it's on display at a fire station near my house, so I guess that's cool.

Helmet

I found some old photos of a project I did in high school for an art class, so I scanned them in for an old art post.  As I recall a demolition derby driver wanted his helmet to look like a skull.  So I was lucky enough to paint it.

After removing some of the hardware pieces, we sanded it first, to remove gloss coating.
Then I sketched on the design.
Then we painted it with some kind of enamel paints. 

Last I think my art teacher helped me apply a glossy layer.
He had a black visor so the mouth area was a big black hole. 

Jane Austen

I decided to take a stab at painting Ms Austen for my wife's birthday.  I based it on several popular versions, but I added my own ideas.  Most descriptions I saw described Jane as having a small mouth, dark hazel eyes.  I tried to make her look thoughtful.  But I never really liked some of the paintings based on Casandra's drawing.  The drawing made by Jane's sister was considered at the time, "most unflattering" and a poor representation of Jane...so I didn't let it tie me down too bad, although I am using the same pose etc.  Of course once I gave it to Erin she pulled out a huge book with lots of paintings of Jane's brothers, sisters, mother...  I probably would have changed a couple things having seen that book most notably her nose may have more of a button to it.  But I'm still pretty proud of the drawing.  I sketched it out first on paper, scanned it in and painted it digitally. Then I printed it out and framed it.

Painted it to fit in a oval frame.

Jack-O-Lanterns

These are our Jack-O-Lanterns from 2 years ago.  Last year we didn't make any but this year we are going to try again.  I really want to try out this technique of carving away at the pumpkin.

Erin and I at a friends house.

I used a yellow pumpkin and I kind-of messed it up pretty bad last time, but still managed to get a skull out of it.  I tried to make some kind of tentacle thingy that lived in the scull but it ended up looking dumb.  Erin made a cute little Mario Mushroom from one of those turban squashes turned upside down.  We didn't come up with that idea on our own.  Our buddy made it first.

I was trying to make it look kind of like a Goa'uld from StarGate. 

I burned up and dripped a red candle all over to make it look bloody. 
It still looked pretty stupid.

Cute Erin!

Jabba the Potato

I also posted this on my Star Wars blog, but since I have my other food art here, I decided to post this in both blogs. At Star Wars Celebration I was met and was really impressed with Oki, the Japanese vegetable carver. His work is really cool.  I thought I'd try carving up my own American veggie, the potato.  I did not have a very good knife.  It was sort of a dull steak knife, or a sharp butter knife, depending on how you look at it. I thought I'd try making Jabba, because he seemed a bit easier than trying to sculpt Leia.  If I messed up carving Leia she might look like Jabba, and if I messed up carving Jabba, well he'd probably still look like a Hutt.

Not too bad for my first attempt right?

Then I ruined it by adding too much food coloring.

But, after a night in the fridge, it's looking kind of good now! 
Almost like how Jabba looks when he gets strangled by Leia.

Fun With A Soldering Iron

Want a couple hours of fun?  Get a soldering iron, and a pack of plastic Cowboys and Indians.  In my case I borrowed my father-in-laws soldering iron.  ( I think I still have it too!)  I imagine you can do it with army men as well.  Some were made by me, some were made by my wife's brothers-in-law.

So a couple bucks spent and loads of fun and I even got a free soldering iron out of it.  Thanks Rick! 

FoodArt: Pokemon Cake

The day of the wedding, while everyone else was out and about Josh and I decided to make a groom's cake for our good buddy Leif.  Here, Joshua considers the construction of a Pokeball from these two mounds of rice-crispies. 

First we cut out the "trench" around the circumference of once side. Then frosted it white.   The other half we frosted red.

While Josh continues to frost half red, I cut out some decorations for the cake, their favorite Pokemon.

Josh cuts out the center white activation button.

Almost finished!  Josh continues to cut out the button.

At the Wedding.  The Pokeball was pretty heavy since it was solid rice crispy treats.  Oh did we mention that we packed it really well into a bowl to make each hemisphere, and we froze it briefly to make it extra keep it's shape?  That made it rather a challenge for the bride and groom to cut!

Avengers BSA Patch

A local Scout Troop was going to have a camp that was Superhero themed.   They had what they wanted in mind, which was to use the Avengers logo and Captain America's shield.  Not too tricky.   Illustrator Vector

Later they gave me a copy of the patch.  Cool to see that it was created!

Alien Drawing

I've sketched out a Grey here with ink on paper.    I've always liked Aliens and I've been an "I want to believe" sort of guy.  I generally like the spacecraft more than the little green men, but I think the Grey is such an iconic creature I wanted to draw one. 

After scanning the ink drawing I'm using Corel Painter to block out the background colors.  Ink is still visible.  I often don't go any farther than this with my art.  I tend to like the messy, sketchy look, this is all in the first day, all within 2-3 hours.

On the second day, I've blended the ink lines into the drawing here. Still using painter

I've worked with the eyes a bit, and I'm pretty happy how they are looking.  Added some more texture to the skin as well as some highlights.  Looking less flat now.   Probably been 2-3 more hours.

Free Comic Book Day!

Nintendo Party!  As a celebration of  free comic book day 2012, we hosted a "hang out and play video games, and read your comic books party".  This was the same day last year that we had the  Four Swords Adventure play-through.  This time the main event was a Dr. Mario Tournament.  I decided to make some "pixel" viruses.  I actually made them in Illustrator so they are actually "vector" viruses which is an alliteration so that's pretty cool.  My wife won the tournament of course.  Go Honey!

Food Art: Hogwarts Castle

Harry Potter part 7b was coming out, and a lot of my friends are big Harry Potter fans.  I like it too, but really, it was an excuse to make a giant edible castle.  Never tried that before!  Step 1, research, find floor plans and layout design.  I shaped a couple boxes so that I could raise up the castle off the cookie sheet a bit. 


Quick note here.  There are a lot of floor plans out there for Hogwarts.  I found this one online, I did not make it.  From what I gather, Hogwarts sort of grew with each movie that came out.  So this is a larger, more recent version.

Then I covered the boxes with another floor plan, and covered the whole thing in wax paper again.  Next I made the cliffs and surrounding grounds out of rice-crispy treats.


I started out with the great hall, which ironically turns out to be a very small part of Hogwarts.  

Continued to build out.  I used wafers for the roofing.  which turned out to be a brilliant idea.  Graham crackers for the walls for the most part.

This is my favorite part.  I really like the angles of the roofing  here.

End of evening one.   I think about 5 hours in, one wing of the castle finished.

Evening two, built the second wing.  I had a bunch of ice cream cones with no tips by the time I was done.  The end of a Rollo on the right is the clock tower I think.

All finished.  The First Tower I made should have been a little tower in the end.  Oh well, next time.

Made it to the party without any problems.  Sadly I forgot to add Hagrid's hut until I got to the party, so I just stuck a Rollo in the rice crispies where it's supposed to be.  

FoodArt: Zelda Party

This was going to be a serious Zelda Party. We were going to Play The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures which is a GameBoy game that normally requires 1 GameCube with 4 GameBoy Advances. We decided to play it right!  It required 4 GameCubes with 4 GameBoy Players, 1 Wii, 5 TVs, 4 wavebird controllers, and 4 Gameboy Link cables.

All hooked up together! With such a crazy setup, we wanted to play through the game in as few gatherings as possible so that we wouldn't have to haul around TVs all over the place, and so Josh could eventually get his living room back. It still took us 2 weekends and a lot of hours. We had a lot of players in shifts playing continually.

To keep things going we had Zelda themed food all day. Four Swords fruit platter, bean dip shaped like the Hyrulian Overworld, Lon Lon Milk (thanks to someone else online for the label). Jello Ruppees-easy and very cool. And Potion made from Hawian Punch and Applesauce jars. Not shown is of course Triforce-pizza, Triforce-chips, and Triforce-rice crispies! Some ideas were better than others obviously.  Some were very easy and fun. Some I stayed up waaay too late working on, trying to make it look okay...

Star Wars Campaign Shirts

In August 2008, during the presidential campaign, Obama's HOPE poster was everywhere. We saw lots of parodies of the poster out there, but we decided of making our own Star Wars versions. It was tons of fun.

You have to be a pretty big nerd to get this one.  Hint that's Captain Needa from ESB.