Random Face Oil Painting Part 2: starting to paint, but mostly derping around

I should probably say that I probably don’t think I use the most technically correct oil-painting etiquette, so to speak. I tend to paint where I feel like it and when I already have the right color on my brush for an area of the piece. Nobody ever really taught me to do it differently, and it works for me. I end up wasting less paint, for sure.

That said, I would like to show you some of the progress made up to date.

Here you can see some random lips that I painted as well as the top of Loki’s face.

 

Here’s a detail of what will be Indiana Jones as I finish up the last few faces to sketch.

 

My friend Dallin decided to help me out.

 

He’s a computer science major, but I think that he missed his calling. Clearly, a brilliant artist.

 

I started painting my roommate Tarah, but the original sketch didn’t have an eye because I was struggling with it and lazy. One hyper night while I was painting, I gave her a patch. Dumb. It’s going to take a few layers to hide that…. I’m kinda diggin’ the pirate thing, though.

 

Here’s what the whole thing looks like so far!

Random Faces Oil Painting Part 1: sketching it in

I’ve decided that I’m going to take you step by step-ish on the current painting I’m working on.

My roommates and I decided that I should paint something to hang in our living room, and I thought that doing a whole bunch of faces would be fun. We brainstormed a bunch of movie or TV characters, celebrities, random stuff, inside jokes, and logos that would work for it and planned on using all of my roommates and I. I got two canvases to make it a diptych (two separate paintings that are one piece).

First, I used a ruler to block off a whole bunch of randomly shaped squares. After making a small note in each box of what or who would go there, I started looking for references to use for each square.

Then I started sketching the faces in!

Here’s the thing about sketching in the faces on a canvas intended to become an oil paint, or acrylic for that matter. Be warned that the pencil lead will smear into the paint and give you lots of pain. Therefore, most of the time, you only want to put the barest lines for proportion sake and then hope you get it right with the paint. I did that with this one somewhat, although you’d want to make it even lighter around the eyes and mouth than I have it now if you wanted to use this method:

This is going to be Heath Ledger’s Joker.

However, try as I might, my sketches usually don’t start out right, and so I end up fixing and shading them until I’m satisfied and they end up looking like this:

My pre-sketch of Wentworth Miller as smoldering away as Michael Scofield. My roommates and I–okay, mainly it’s me–have a small Prison Break obsession right now.

Which would be fine if I was leaving it pencil, but that much graphite would be absolute misery to try to paint over.

However, I know a secret.

In cases like this, I simply apply a very thin coat of gesso, slightly watered down, over the lead. If you don’t have gesso, some thinned out white acrylic would probably work as well. After it dries, assuming you do it thin enough, you can still clearly see the pencil marks underneath, but it won’t smear at all when you try to paint it!

Don’t worry if the pre-sketchess a little rough–you can see that mine are–because you are going to painting over them.

As of a couple of weeks ago, here was the progress on my piece…

Christmas Music

It’s that time of year when the people who hate Christmas music until December get to stop complaining. (Not that I approve of it in October or anything.) But I do love Christmas music, guys.

I find that I especially love the more obscure Christmas songs. I mean, Silent Night is great, but how many times can you hear it before you start wishing people would do it double-time to get it over with?

One of my favorite Christmas songs is I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, particularly the Sally DeFord arrangement. Once, I was asked to sing a Christmas song for a seminary class. I was extremely busy with school and I simply didn’t have time to pick out a song or an arrangement and burn it to a CD. The night before, I remembered my commitment to sing and had a small breakdown. I knew I needed to sleep because I was on my way to getting sick, but I was swamped with homework and had no idea how I was going to do it all and get a song ready. My wonderful father sat me down and told me not to worry about it, but to wake up a half-hour early and he would find me a pretty arrangement for something and burn it for me. In the morning, he had prepared a CD with several different arrangements of “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” and this was my favorite. Thanks, Daddy.

“Book”

I was a peaceful, easy-going baby. I didn’t cry or complain or even babble much. My parents say this is because I was already creative, off in my own little world.

We lived in our little house in Provo, Utah. I like to imagine my two older sisters playing upstairs, preoccupied. Downstairs, the smell of the homemade bread my mother always made for dinner lingers in the kitchen and floats into the adjacent living room, where my dad holds my hands and I totter around. I trip over a toy and fall down, but I laugh, and my mother scoops me onto her lap, holding me upright and kissing my head, already covered in curly, dark hair.  “Say ‘Mama’!” she coos. “Say ‘Daddy!’”

Entirely disinterested in their smiling and fussing, I reach my tiny hands toward our stack of cardboard picture books, and insist, “Book.”

My very first word? ‘Book.’ Yup. This would prove absurdly appropriate as I grew up.

It’s seventh grade, and I sit with my best friend, Sydney, in her bedroom—all blue. Blue walls, dark blue bed, light blue curtains. We chat and make tiny colorful stars out of paper while singing along to Hoobastank and Nickleback on her iPod. She’s so much cooler than me for having an iPod.

I notice a document opened on her computer. The title, typed in a mysterious-looking font, glows at me from across the room: Shadic.

“What’s that?” I ask, nodding at the computer.

She smiles a little self-consciously, tucking the tiny braid she always wears at the front of her highlighted, long hair behind her ear. “It’s a book I’m writing,” she says.

I gape at her. I love reading. By seventh grade, I’ve probably consumed more novels in the last year than many people do in their entire lifetime, and I always do well with writing short stories and such in English classes. Somehow it has never occurred to me to try to write a real, live book. “That’s awesome!” I moan, once again in awe of her superior coolness. “What’s it about?”

She tells me about her story, a fantasy, loosely based off Norse mythology, and then she lets me read it. I haven’t read much fantasy up to now, having usually stuck to historical fiction, and it dazzles me.

“This is really good,” I say honestly, and behind my eyes, wheels begin to turn.

The day after Sydney shows me her book, when I get home from school to my new house in Pleasant Grove, I deposit my stack of new books on the paper-strewn wooden bench in our living room where my younger sister and I throw our backpacks when we feel too lazy to put them away. I pull open a blank, white Microsoft Word document on our big, boxy Windows computer and start typing away. “Chapter 1—The Lightless City.”

I write about twenty pages within a few days. George Bernard Shaw said, “Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery – it’s the sincerest form of learning.” My writing’s not very good, and some of the events introduced in the second chapter borderline plagiarize Sydney’s Shadic (at the time I can’t think of any idea that could possibly be cooler than hers), but it still excites me, and I begin to learn.

I’ve always been creative; I daydream and make up adventures in my mind. Learning to put them on paper suddenly introduces a plethora of possibilities to me. For the first time, everything that has lived inside my mind can exist somewhere in reality.

The current version of my story bears virtually no resemblance to that first attempt, but interestingly, I never scrapped the whole idea at once. I started writing the thing in order, but I have become a better writer since I started, so I redid the beginning. I threw out the love triangle because it got in the way: massive sections, trashed. One of my characters insisted on developing a sense of humor, making obscure Shakespeare references, and finally going crazy, so I let him. Little by little, I rewrote until I had nothing left of “The Lightless City” but a few old notebooks and almost two-hundred printed-out pages of brain-dumping.

But the point is, it all started because I loved BOOKS.

Somebody said that reading usually precedes writing and the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading and that reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. This was definitely true of me.

If you want to be a better writer, you need to learn to love to read, read, read, read, read, read, read!

Better Late Than Never (Part 2)

Since that painting was such a big one, I thought I’d show a few details from it.

The fun–and difficult–thing about this piece was that I used actual pictures of my classmates as characters from shows that my school did during the years I attended, and the audience members are theatre students as well. Although the piece was large, the faces were still quite small–some of them were probably about the size of the cap of a milk-jug, which made it hard to capture peoples’ likenesses. I feel pretty happy with most of them, but I won’t lie and say there aren’t a few that I would redo if I had the canvas still. But anyway.

The three figures on the stairs (Aida, Amneris, and Radames) and the one in the lower left corner (Mereb) are from Aida. You might recognize Daniel Bean on the lower left from some other posts.

Marshall as Lieutenant Cioffi, Lauren as producer Carmen, and Michael as director Belling from Curtains. Some of my favorite characters, but more so people, of all time!

Here’s another scene from Curtains…if you hadn’t guessed, the painting centers around the Curtains theme. The line on the sign at the top–“We’re A Special Kind of People Known as Show People”–is from a song out of Curtains. Also, that chick in the middle is me, which you might have noticed if you watched the video of THS Thataway from the posts “The Girl Gets Around–But Only On Stage.” In case you’re wondering, never, ever, ever try to paint fishnets with oil paint in this small of an image…

My awesome ginger buddy Adam is the techy at the top. He was pro. Seriously. On the lower right are Lucas (whom I dub my Elaborate Life due to antics backstage during Aida) and Lisa (who is basically the same person as me) from Our Town. On the ladder and standing below are crazy improv-crew Daniel R., Chance, and Cameron. (Possibly the funniest kids you will ever meet.) The head on the left is lovely Abby playing Jessica in Curtains, and on the right is Austin as a Curtains cowboy…although we had cowboys in just about every show… Also, this picture fish-eyed a little bit, so they don’t usually look so fun-house-mirror-ed.

Sitting down is Brandon as Pippin from Pippin, and James above him is playing Lewis. In the middle is Caleb, who played Ren in Footloose. (You can see him and me in the video of “Almost Paradise” in the post “Voice takes an ill-timed vacation”). On the upper right is my best friend and little sister Elise, and Paul, who played Adam and Eve in Mark Twain’s Diary of Adam and Eve.

Here’s a scene from the Merchant of Venice, with my friends Alana as Portia, Alejandra as Nerissa, Royce as Antonio, and Craig as Shylock. (I actually posted one of the exact pictures I used for reference of this–the one of Portia–a few posts ago in the “Just in the Ensemble” Post.)

Better Late Than Never (Part 1)

At the end of my senior year in high school, I agreed to paint a big, huge, fatty oil painting–like, taller than me–for the drama hallway of the school. I couldn’t finish it by the end of the school year, given that there were only a few weeks left, so I decided to finish it over the summer…

June…

July…

August…

passed, and the big canvas sitting in my living room, taking up Mom’s sewing space looked like

w00t. -.-

Then I had to leave for college, and and there was absolutely no way that the canvas would fit in a dormroom. I decided I would have to finish it in a hurry over Christmas break.

By the end of Christmas break, I had the curtains that frame the top and sides of the piece done. Yippie.

Finally, the next summer came, and I decided that now that I was a year late, I’d better crack down and get it done. I worked on it here and there, but didn’t get to any of the time consuming parts–the fine details–until the last three weeks of the summer.

Laying color in, probably about a week and a half to go.

Still blocking it in.

Most of the base laid in…

Starting details on faces.

Books on tape of Elantris, Les Miserables, Alcatraz and the Evil Librarians, Pride and Prejudice, Beyonders–A Land Without Heroes,  and Tale of Two Cities later, I finally finished it!

Done!

Now, more than a full year after my graduation, it hangs next to the ticket office of the theater at Timpanogos High School, making me the worst super senior in history.

Interacting with Regular Humans as a Character

I can think of two major times when I got to perform while talking to the “audience.” One was in my Junior year in high school, when my school performed Pippin and my director took a hippy festival approach. For about twenty minutes before the show started, we wandered around in our flower child outfits and acted like some kind of carnival worker, some people reading palms, dancing, fortune telling. Har, I was a sketch artist and did a few five-minute portraits of random crowd members each night. The trick was that we had to stay in character the entire time, even if our friends tried to talk to us. It was wonderful good fun but extremely difficult for me, as improv has never been my best theatrical strength.

My flower-child persona in Pippin. In the second act, I would change and take on the role of Catherine, but for the first act I got to be another member in the ensemble.

The second time was when I performed in the Princess Festival at Thanksgiving Point. I was actually drafted into the show at the last minute by my friend Miriam without auditioning because a few of the twelve dancing princesses needed to be double-cast for half of the run. I ended up performing as Emerald (“the trickster, who loves to have fun!” as the uber-cheesy rhyming introduction poem informed the delighted, booger-eating little girls at the Festival).

Me as Emerald in the middle. In the dark blue on the right is my good friend Miriam, here Sapphire, and on the left is Heather. Daniel Barlocker creeps from behind as Captain Hook. Honestly, I think most of the little girls liked Hook more than a lot of the princesses…

I mock, but I’m actually extremely glad I did it. Not only were all of the cast members amazing, but the booger-eating little girls were actually adorable. To this day, I have the hardest time not calling every little girl I talk to “Princess.” As the trickster, I had a lot of opportunities to play with the girls. Aside from a short show and a session where we taught the girls a simple dance every half hour, we spent most of the time on the lawn where music blasted all day and we danced around and played with passing mini-princesses. To dull the pain of talking in a sickly sugar voice all of the time and dancing nonstop for hours on end in hundred-degree weather with a pounding dehydration headache, I got to do little magic tricks and act like a goof now and again. At times, it was hard to keep up the act, especially when older people would try to talk to me. We weren’t allowed to break character ever in case any of the little kids were watching. After acting like a character for a while, though, it becomes increasingly easy to fall into that character and respond naturally when talking to people (even skeptic mothers).

Color Wheel

 

After last post, I decided it would be a good idea to write something cold, scientific, informational, and completely dis-personal.

The colors in the color wheel should not be difficult to learn. It’s basically a rainbow smooshed in a circle with the in-betweeners. Red, red-orange, orange, yellow-orange, yellow, yellow-green, green, green-blue/teal, blue, blue-violet, violet, red-violet. After writing that out, I realized that the picture I chose has pretty shoddy representations of the colors. Peh.

Anyway, the basics.

Primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. You can mix these in different combinations and proportions to get pretty much any color unless it needs to be lightened with white.

Analogous colors: Colors next to each other on the color wheel, ie red and orange, purple and blue, etc. Great for blending together on a plane because you’ll never get an icky brown where you don’t want it if you use analogous colors.

Complementary colors: Colors opposite one another on the wheel, ie purple and yellow, red-orange and blue-green, red and green. Great for contrasting an object in the foreground and background or simply adding contrast in general.

withdrawals

Allow me to take an opportunity to vent.

I need to be in a play.

Badly.

I haven’t been in any kind of dramatic production since this last summer, and it was the Princess Festival, which was wonderful and fun but not really a play. Before that, it was a concert scene in college. Before that, it was my last high school musical. Do you even know what this means? The last real, full-sized production I was in happened, like, more than a year and a half ago.

I know that I’ve said that it’s good to be able to do lots of things and take time for each one, and do each in its due season, as it were, and I still say that. But I think the bottom line is that it’s due season for me to be in a show, dangit! I have some problems. My college’s shows are difficult to get into if you’re not an active part of the theatre program, which I won’t be next semester, not to mention being very intense and not at all conducive to my busy schedule. Honestly, my dilemma comes down to the fact that I don’t have a car. If I had transportation, I could audition for some dinky community play and at least have a stage to perform on. Chances are, I won’t be able to get into a play until next summer…and maybe not even then, since I have a lot of work to do to pay for housing and whatnot.

Basically, I’m going stir-crazy and I need some cheesy choreography or overdramatic lines to say at an audience right now. I’d settle for any kind performance coming up in the near future, but aside from my LDS ward choir’s Christmas program, which as relatively good as we are, really doesn’t count since I doubt there will be a lot of choreography or lines, I’ve got nothing to look forward to.

Well, I’m done ranting. For the record, I don’t feel better at all. Excuse me while I eat some comfort-Nutella.

Procrastination Rewarded

First of all, I should mention that although I love creative writing, I really dislike writing formal papers, especially of literary analysis. I love talking about literature, and I love reading it, but I just do not like writing about it.

So.

I’ve noticed this phenomenon. I tend to procrastinate work that I don’t want to do until the last minute, but I usually get A’s on it anyway. However, I usually end up staying up late at night before it’s due, having mild emotional breakdowns, and generally wishing that I’d just done it earlier.

A few months ago, I decided to change this trend. I had two papers due within a couple days of each other, one in my American Lit class and the other in my British Lit class. Determined not to stress myself out at the end, I started both pieces early. I still ended up stressing and fixing things at the last minute, but the level of meltdown was greatly decreased from what it could have been. I worked on them for hours upon hours, much longer than I have worked on any other writing project I’ve done…except my novel, obviously…and I was sure that I was going to kill on ’em.

 

A-

 

Now, I know that I shouldn’t be too upset with a couple of A-, especially not in college courses.

But…I’m used to seeing an A, even in difficult university classes. In the past when I didn’t get one, I knew it was because I did it at the last minute or I didn’t try very hard. I truly did my best on these two stupid papers. Right about then, I could have punched a baby. No. But I could have punched a regular human. However, I said nothing, as I knew that it would make me sound like a snooty bratchild to complain about an A-.

A few weeks ago, I had another two literary analysis papers due in the same two classes, four to five pages long. I tried to work on them early, but I was busy with other things and I simply wasn’t functioning very well. Soooooo…I ended up writing them both the night before they were due, throwing them together haphazardly and doing the best I could with about two hours max on each.

I got them both back a few days ago.

 

 

A

 

 

 

 

So dumb. Maybe I just write better under pressure. The other day my roommate rewrote a paper in a couple of hours the day it was due and said she liked it tons better than the original draft. Has anyone else noticed this?