A few projects that happened in between

For some time now I have had the idea to create a bunch of different caricature type of paintings on block canvas that would be organised into a series. 
I wanted to do them in different sizes and draw or paint in different styles. 

Last year some time I came across an incredible comic book artist Brett Weldele on YouTube, who demonstrated how he paints with distress inks. I really wanted to try something like that.  I encourage you to go check out Brett Weldele - you can do that by clicking on his underscored there - he is super incredible.

Now whenever I build up the courage to attempt to paint I normally use acrylics, but lately I have been loving how easily I can get distress inks to blend and move and react. So when Tim Holtz introduced Distress paint, which kinda married ink and paint and allowed paint to behave like an ink – I knew that I had to see what I could get it to do.  I also had a bunch of distress ink markers, and I figured that they would be perfect to add detail with. 


Recently when I purged my craft room/office and discovered that I had a bunch of unadulterated block canvas in odd sizes. I decided that I would try the caricature series idea and see how well I could get the distress inks,paints, stains and regular craft acrylics to work together.  What a brilliantly fun experiment this has been. 

 It’s not only about how incredibly well all those pigment mediums did work together but it was draw-ainting (yeah – I made that word up DRAW+PAINT)that was totally fun too. 

The thing about doing caricature style paintings is that you don’t have to be very good at drawing or painting to do so, if you can get the slightest of resemblance right – you can happily make yourself believe that you are drawing caricature portraits of yourself.  

I did about four super quickly this last week or so – I am still not sure whether I want to leave them as is or alter them a little and make it more mixed media pieces, you know like adding the odd flower, gear,keyhole or tissue-tape.  And….I really feel like I want to glossy accent the lips and eyes.  I could throw in a few random inspirational quotes here and there.  I don't know – what do you think?  I am leaning toward altering them though, because embellishing stuff with random elements is the correct way to live, it is written there in an ancient book of wisdom – I’m telling you – totally true story.


Today’s other happy thing was that the order that I put in at Scrapworx (my local Tim Holtz/Ranger stockist)for the Metallic Distress Paints came in.  I have another idea to do a celestial type painting and I am pretty sure those metallic paints are going to work out perfectly for that.