glazed onions - not a recipe

I have been learning a new skill (glazing), and thought it would be comfortable to relax and paint like I normally do (sloppy) for bit. I was wrong. When you're in the middle of developing a skill, you are terrible at everything. Or you think you are, which is kind of the same thing.

I am at the bottom of that yellow line right now

I picked up some persimmons because they looked nice and simple, and started a fight which has lasted two weeks.

My first painting of the persimmons was messy and boring, and I wiped it out with a rag.

nailed it

Tried again on Monday. They still looked weird. Are persimmons dusty or brightly colored? What is going on with those crumbled leaves with rubbery nubs in the middle? They look fake. Get yourselves together, persimmons.

the beer tea towel is coming along, anyway

Threw the persimmons in the fruit bowl and worked on my onion, instead.

This onion has been slowly built up, layer by layer, for a few weeks. I am beginning to love glazing, now that I'm not doing it completely wrong.

4 layers of thin paint. Only 2-100 layers to go

Zenny likes the onion because it looks like a blossoming flower. I like it because it looks like an onion taking its bra off after a long day at the onion office.

I'm going to switch back to portraiture soon. My kids want me to paint them as 18th century vampires like the guys from What We Do in the Shadows, and that style is all about the glazing.

official vampire portraits by artist Freeman White

This might be a niche I'd be willing to fill if I turned to portraiture as a career. "You, as a distinguished dead person." Like those old-timey photo booths, but for $5,000 a picture.

But first I have to get good at glazing, so I'm back to digging in produce bins. I found chestnuts at the grocery store and decided they would make nice models. I didn't know how to choose attractive chestnuts for a painting (do you pick the ones with interesting cracks or dents? Skinny ones? Lopsided ones?) but finally decided it is fair to judge a food by how much you want to eat it, so I fished out the most delicious-looking ones and came home with a bag of chestnuts that were so huge, my family thought they were... things that were not chestnuts. At this moment I can't think of nuts that are bigger than chestnuts, but I am not about to do a google image search for "huge nuts" to find out. I learned my lesson with the "Prince Albert" tobacco cans. And the time I looked up "used tissue".

Google, show me images of "handsome chestnut".

good thing I didn't add "carved with X and roasted"

Nevermind.


Opportunity

I like painting my kids, but it would be nice to practice on some non-family members so I can comfortably screw up their likenesses a bit more, and I haven't made good enough friends with anyone at the library to invite them down into my basement to dress up as a vampire for "art". Luckily, a couple of old friends are coming to visit this weekend, and I can probably get them to pose for me. Without the neck ruffs, maybe. (I don't have any neck ruffs, I have tea towels with beer bottles printed on them that we can wrap around our necks like cravats.) Have been tidying up and doing yard work to get the place presentable for company.

Veteran's Day weekend is usually a time I am flying off to a painting workshop (cheaper than going back to grad school), but I couldn't do it this year, so it will be good to have friends over to distract me from impulse-booking plane tickets to Seattle. Or to talk me into impulse-booking plane tickets to Seattle. I'm flexible.

Dead hibiscus

I've been sick this week. Quacked at babies for toddler time and then went home to work on freelance illustrations with a giant bottle of ibuprofen. When my tablet got too hot, I gave myself a few hours to paint a dead hibiscus. I get one blossom a week, and I was too late on this one. I picked it out of the dirt and shook off the bugs, deciding it could be a companion piece for the live one I painted last week.

Of course, as soon as I was busy painting the dead flower, the hibiscus plant popped open another fresh blossom. Too bad, I like the dead one better.

For the last few weeks I've been slowly dabbing away at a painting of Leif. This child is impossible to paint, but I finally got a reasonable likeness of him.

CLOSE ENOUGH

Another one of our patrons died, having somehow drowned after falling off a surfboard. I looked him up to see if his obituary had been posted yet, and found a newspaper article from 1999 about how he witnessed his friends murder two drug dealers, disposed of their cars, helped hide their bodies for maybe a month, dug a pit to bury the decomposing corpses, dug them back up a few weeks later, and weighted their rotting remains with cement tiles before chucking them into the ocean.

Holy shit, Mr. L.

And here I was getting excited about not getting eaten by a shark.