This may or may not be the end of a short series of paintings of plastic guns (see Gun #1 and Gun #2). I’d like to paint more, but I haven’t found any other cool-looking plastic guns to use as subjects. Guess it’s time to start hitting the 99-cent stores!

You can see the first one here… more to come!

I posted a photo of a painting in progress a few weeks ago on Facebook, and a couple of people responded with comments along the lines of, “It looks finished–what more needs to be done?” So I thought I’d post a set of before/after photos, and take this opportunity to illustrate a bit of this process.

In the photo below, I’ve taken the final, finished piece (on the right) and put it up next to what I’d consider the “second draft” (on the left):

(Click to see larger)

Clearly you can see that the painting on the left is very rough. The colors need to be smoothed out, and blended together properly:

Colors need to be corrected, and details (like the shadows) added:

Each step of this process has its own unique characteristics:

–The first draft is always fun because you get to see your painting emerge. On the other hand, you have to mix your paints and determine accurate colors for the piece at this stage. That process usually requires a lot of trial-and-error to get the colors just right; after all, these are the colors you are going to be using for the long-haul, and it would be difficult to change them halfway through the piece.

I also paint the background during the first draft; if the background has a gradient (like this piece does), then it requires quite a few coats of paint to get it blended just right. You don’t want to do this later because that blending can get messy and knock out some of the detail around the edges of the main subject.

–The second draft is the longest part of the process. This is the real meat of the work, where all the details get added or refined. It’s important to stay focused and work methodically at this stage; if I find myself jumping all over the place, I’ll begin to feel lost, and wonder how the hell I’m going to pull this thing off.

–The third draft can often last for weeks. This is not because I am working on it constantly, but because it requires a lot of time for my eyes and brain to rest. Keep in mind, at this point I have usually spent upwards of 50-60 hours (more, for a bigger piece) staring at this painting, so I need to walk away from it a lot so I can see it again. Inconsistencies in color, rough spots, missing white highlights–all of these things reveal themselves during this period, and I am so accustomed to staring at this canvas that I sometimes just don’t see them. It’s at this point that I am most interested in what I like to think of as painting with grace. I not only want to reproduce the image as accurately as possible, but I want to create a beautiful painting, where every stroke is rendered as gracefully as possible.

So, anyway, here’s the final, finished piece:

Gun #1
24″ x 36″
Acrylic on canvas

Some details:

Religious Bunny
36″ x 24″
Acrylic on canvas

I originally wanted to call this one, “I Believe In God”. Now THERE’S a nice high-fallutin’ artspeak name for a painting of a foil-covered chocolate Easter Bunny. But that was what I kept thinking about when I was working on it.

When I was a small child, I truly did believe that God, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny all lived together in a castle in the sky. These were looming figures. And these figures’ appearance had hinged solely on impressions I gained from the material surrounding me. Every holiday celebration was peppered with colorful, mass-produced candies and toys. You didn’t get a birthday cake; you got a cake with a plastic carousel on top of it. You didn’t get a Halloween cupcake, you got a cupcake with a smiling plastic pumpkin on it. And Easter was the greatest because everything seemed to feature images of a smiling cartoonish bunny, usually wearing some kind of corny outfit.

God was different. We didn’t have God in my house. We didn’t go to church, and my family was reticent about anything even remotely involved with religion. If any of us had the guts to ask my dad what religion we were, he’d say, “We’re NOTHING.” And that would be that.

So God was always vague. I knew from TV shows and movies that God was someone that people prayed to to make things happen. But I had no real concept what he might actually look like. I’d picture a faceless figure, huge, up in the clouds pointing down at the Earth to make things happen.

So this bunny, he could be looking skyward–he could be giving a knowing wink to his friend God in the clouds. This bunny, he believes in God. This bunny knows. He lives with him in the clouds.

It makes me believe in God just a little to see something so beautiful, so colorful, so detailed and nuanced in a figure that few people have ever bothered to look closely at. This–to me–is God at work. God is in the details, and every time he reveals these details to me, I think to myself, There’s God at work. He’s up in those clouds, he’s pointing down at me and saying stop for a goddamned moment and look. Look at the beauty in this world in even the smallest, most unlikely places. Look.

Bunny “Happy”
52″ x 32″
Acrylic on canvas

Not the best photo… I’ll replace it soon with a better one.

This completes the Three Foil Bunnies trilogy, which I’ve been working on since last fall. They’re each 66″ tall by 40″-46″ wide.

Here are all three paintings together:

And just for fun, here are the original photos I was working from:

I might switch them around, installation-wise; this is an interesting balance, don’t you think?

Gold Foil Bunny (Suspenders)
44″ x 26″

I painted this one during a break from the series of three Foil Bunnies I’ve been working on. But now that it’s finished, I am back to work on the third and final large-scale canvas in that series:

I’m calling these Me and My Big Mouth. They’re 8×10, and painted on rough canvas panels (therefore the more ragged style). Ideally, they will be framed in a nice white wooden frame.

More to come!