Post #716323 by tigertail777 on Thu, May 8, 2014 3:43 AM

I see Zombzilla over the horizon.... he is crushing everything in his path! RUN!

And... Thank YOU Minitikimeow... I just love the way the mug turned out.

Thanks as always for stopping by the Tiger hut, Wendy!

Yes, I did finish the painting in time to send off to the gallery show, and was fairly pleased with the end result. Now we wait and see if it sells. I've only sold one painting before in my life and never in a gallery. To be honest I never have considered myself a painter, I didn't think I had the chops and really thought no one would want my subject matter on their walls. I only had the barest inkling of the low brow art movement, and still am incredulous that people can make a living selling such fantastical and weird art. After talking things over with a few fellow artists (Brad Parker, and Dawn Frasier) they sort of talked me off the ledge of underpricing myself which I always have done in the past. I am highly doubtful it will sell at the price I asked ($700), but I am told that is a reasonable price for a 20X24 painting of that complexity... or as Dawn put it: "That is about $1.50 a square foot". Yeah, I guess when you put it like that... but I am still nervous about it selling. I will be packing in my regular Joe job next week, due to their ludicrous wanting MORE work out of me for less pay, so for a while I will have more time to devote to art. Be nice if I could actually make a living off it. :wink:

Okay, public announcements are over... on with the show...

Not sure where I left off, so I will start with my little pop culture "joke" for this piece: a 1970's style garbage can from The Enchanted Tiki Room in Disneyland. I always love incorporating some kind of little visual joke that adds to the enjoyment and theme of the piece.

Then I really concentrated on the background carnage going on from the big old Zombzilla skeletal foot stomp. Glass flying everywhere from broken tables, stomped down shrubbery, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

Next was the tiki statue that Zombzilla pulled up out of the ground. I wanted this to give the impression in a funny way that Zombzilla had a huge drink in his hand, thus the final title for this piece "Zombzilla Wants a Zombie!", I am not sure if it reads that way, but that's okay either way its funny. I thought it would be really striking to have the tiki high lighted in pink reflected light from the pink neon on the breaking sign.

The Japanese girl who is running barefoot (and therefore probably the only likely survivor in this chaos) kept bothering me. Something did not seem right. Finally I pulled out one of my Japanese pose books (there are lots of these in Japan due to the manga and anime industries. These are fantastic books for figuring out poses, and a lot of them have actual photos of difficult poses for all the details) and found the initial pose I was trying to get across. Details are very tiny and hard to see in this particular book, but I did see enough to realize that foot was twisted at an odd angle, and her hand was also not quite right. So I painted outlines of how things SHOULD be and went from there fixing the pose.

The main foreground Wahini with the dark skin did not seem to have a real dimensional roundness to her figure. It took me a while to parse out why. She is in shadow with a partial sunset, partial twilight sky. Her skin should have some very slight reflections of that blue both from the shadow and the twilight. That was what was missing. Once I realized it, I applied a slight blue hue in the shadows to the other girls as well. A little hard to see it here because the camera was not cooperating with the flash mode.

Once I understood the kind of impact that big of a stomp would make, I had to go back and sort of fix some of the details. I went back into the little tiny tiki bar in darkness under the hut and made the itty bitty fish tank crack and spill water, and jiggled the bottles on the bar. Had I thought of this in the first place I would have made that little scene a bit more active. Those bar bottles are each less than half the size of a penny, I almost needed a smaller brush, something I thought I would never say since I work with really tiny liner brushes already.

I was not happy with the reflection and shadow on the bamboo poles of the roof, and really wanted to make them pop, so I went back and played with the wiggling around glass fishing float, and how that light would bounce off and react to the bamboo, as well as the "VV" (Voodoo Vick's) neon letters on the front of the Ku statue about to topple off the roof (note the broken wires).

From there I just did little finishing touches here and there and put down my unique little signature (there is also a hidden signature, which over the years I started doing from boredom and now friend and family expect it in there to try and find it). And finally sealing it with acrylic sealer as you can see in the next photo, which really made the colors pop.

And a final photo of it upright outside in the sunshine.

I did make scans in pieces on my 11X17 scanner at high res, for possible future prints but have not pieced all the scans into one cohesive whole yet as I am a little afraid the size is going to crash my computer.

I am really falling in love the with painting medium and finding each new outing more fun than the last. I have an idea that popped into my head for the next one I would like to do, not sure how well it will go over but I think it will be a lot of fun. Here's a hint: it's a mixing of some imagery from the Disney film "Fantasia" with tiki's. I'll let your mind reel over that for a while. :wink:

Until next time, beware of Zombzilla Tiki faithful!

[ Edited by: tigertail777 2014-05-08 03:45 ]