Friday, December 31, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 26

Day: 26 "Bristly Boy": 
This has to be the simplest painting I've ever done; that is, simplest in the limited use of strokes and minimal rendering to achieve form.  The board was toned blue-green and I used a frayed, stiff, ox hair round to paint in a scratchy manner to work in some lights.  The brush was big, but I fought my desire to grab smaller brushes for the detail work.  I just adjusted the angle and pressure of the brush, and the amount of paint on the bristles to control it for smaller areas like the eyeballs and nose and lip highlights.  Again, despite it coming together in the small jpg, the loose approach in the application of the paint is another first for me.  At the end, I dripped some solvent for more mood.  I love the drip around his occular cavity. - Tom 

Thursday, December 30, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 25

Day: 25: "Sludge Flesh": 
Another first for me.  Although it's hard to tell in a little jpg, I've never painted this loosely before.  I used lotsa small dabs of paint to indicate form and did very little rendering.  I let the marks create the form and texture of this creature's skin.  Having the strong light source made it very dramatic as did the fade to black.  Take a look at it bigger on my website - I'm really thrilled with this one.  Lotsa fun. - Tom




Wednesday, December 29, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 24


Day: 24 "Blue Moth": 
I wanted to apply the same spatter approach I used on the baby head paintings to a more pretty image.  I chose a moth/butterfly.  But I think the random spattering created a lack of focal point and form in the wings.  In fact this piece feels a bit the same all over without my usual focus.  I do like the feeling of an extended tail that comes down over the woman's nose and some of the outward movement eminating from the moth. - Tom

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 23

Day: 23 "Digital Haze": 
Another photo montage piece for a book cover sample (click here to see the graphic designed cover that I did).  As with the last digital piece, I started with no pre-concieved notion.  I pulled some faces from my archives and started there.  Then I inverted them and the painting took on a light/white-ish palette and I ran with it.  Below you can see the original "finished" version.  It stayed much more snowy and etherial.  I'm enjoying working in new palettes and demonstrating that I have a broader range than most would expect.]

As I added text, the piece seemed a little washed out for a book cover, so I added some border elements and darkened the male face at the top to pop the title more.  Then I couldn't resist adding the tech pecker gag and pulling this light image back into my dark realm - hehe.  - Tom 

Monday, December 27, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 22


Day: 22 "Baby MossFace": 
Yesterday's painting was so much fun, I had to do another.  This time I was focusing on a moss green palette, another color scheme I seldom use.  - Tom


Sunday, December 26, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 16



Day: 21 "Baby Crusty":
Now I'm really letting loose!  This piece was a lot of fun because there is very little rendering and a lot of paint spashing.  Below you can see that all I did was tone the canvas and do a super simple line drawing in acrylic paint, so it wouldn't gow away when I started spattering.  I used some thin glazes then spattered solvent, which caused the canvas color to show through.  I worked quickly and loosely, scraping on paint with stiff brushes and with the palette knife.  I alluded to form by using some darker colors around the edges, but didn't do much rendering.  I love the gritty textures in this one!  Painting is fun!   - Tom



Saturday, December 25, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 20

Day: 20 "Zombie": 
And now for something completely different!!  I did this cute portrait of our french bulldog Zombie for my honey Susie for Christmas.  How sweet :)  I never thought it would come to this, but that's what love will do to you - Merry Christmas everyone!!  Enjoy the holiday with the people most close to you. - Tom


99 Paintings in 99 Days for $99 Project:  Tom Baxa has challenged himself to do a painting a day for 99 consecutive days and post them on BaxaArt.com and his Deadspeak blog.  Each 8x10 painting will be sold for $99, and prints for $9.99.  Baxa will be exploring different subject matters and mediums, including digital, and experimenting with artistic expression.



Friday, December 24, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 19

Day: 19 "TrEYElobite": 
I wanted to do something a bit coarse yet simple for this one.  I worked with a dry-ish brush and scumbled most of the way, allowing bits of the "canvas" to show through.  (All those light bits are not specular highlights from bad photography.)  It's not a big revelation or anything, but I've personally never done that, so it was something new for me.  I've also been enjoying using simple color shapes to frame up the figures in this series and give them punch.
 

Thursday, December 23, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 18

Day: 18 "HellHog Demon": 
I have this frame that I made out of bones that I absolutely love.  It needs a cool painting.  I sketched this guy out on a red panel real quick with magic marker (the opposite of my usual tight pencil drawing on paper mounted down to board) about 2 years ago and never painted it.  Since I'm on a jag with my 99 Paintings, I thought I'd paint it now - and I had a blast!  All the skull painting I've been doing helped me get a more natural feel to the bones and the red ground is powerful and rich.  I let a lot of the red show through the paint in the shadow areas as reflected light and painted the light side of the skull more opaquely.  Prints available at my site.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 17

Day: 17"Empty Inside": 
I felt inspired to do a creepy kid.  I titled this one "Empty Inside" because of the blank expression I captured with this young girl and since her arms feel kinda like disjointed doll arms, she has an even more artificial and hollow feel. 
I tried a color palette I almost never work in - aqua green and tried tow work quickly and stay loose.

 

99 Paintings in 99 Days for $99 Project:  Tom Baxa has challenged himself to do a painting a day for 99 consecutive days and post them on BaxaArt.com and his Deadspeak blog.  Each 8x10 painting will be sold for $99, and prints for $9.99.  Baxa will be exploring different subject matters and mediums, including digital, and experimenting with artistic expression.



Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Monday, December 20, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 15

Day: 15 "Zombie Mash": 
In a lot of these paintings I've been trying to use color a bit more abstractly.  I'm obviously not breaking my boundries too much yet, but the use of the dark blue-green is a little bolder than just using a cooler color in the shadows.  I'm also pushing paint around more quickly and with less tight rendering, letting the stroke define the form.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Saturday, December 18, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 13

Day: 13 "The God Inside": 
The first photo montage piece in the 99 paintings series.  As I've said, this undertaking is designed to be a growth experience for me as an artist, so I'm looking forward to dabbling more with photo montage and digital painting.

I have to say, I had a blast with this image.  I had no as to what I was going to do.  I started with the head and was going to try and do something gritty and creepy (my usual - right?).  Then I put the fuchsia leaf behind his head and the piece suddenly took on a whole different feel.  It felt exulted and powerful, infused with energy and oddly a spiritualness that I wasn't expecting.  So I went with it, adding elements at random and playing with shapes and colors.  The centipede created a nice movement and even that felt spiritual to me, like a celestial oriental dragon or some symbol of uncoiling imagination and creative inspiration.  It also lead to the scorpion-like crown. 

The neat thing about photoshop and using the difference filter is that if often puts me into color palettes that I never would paint in in oils.  All and all the surprise factor on this piece made for one great experience. 

Friday, December 17, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 12

Day: 12 "Weep": 
Some days I'm very excited to paint, and other days it's like pulling teeth.  This was one of those tough days; in fact, I almost didn't paint at all.  But I did.  I tried to do something quick, but it still took 2 hours.  I painted with very thin paint and allowed it to dip in a somewhat controlled manner.  The technique can yeild some interesting results, but I felt the figure was a little weak on this one - I should have used some reference.  Next time :)

I thought I'd post some pictures of my painting table, etc.  First is my drawing table with the Grumbacher MAX paints I use and my palette.  You probably can't tell this in the works, but I've been using basically these colors on a lot of the paintings.
I used to put my oil paints propped on the open oven door to dry them overnight when I had a job due.  I would go to bed and close the door so the fumes wouldn't kill me in the night.  It was effective, but needless to say, not a good idea.  I learned this from another artist and use it instead - 4 $8 clamp lights with 150w spotlight bulbs in them.  I made the stand myself with legs on hinges so it can be a bit more portable for storing.  It gives off enough low heat to dry the paintings.
 And here's a stack of the 8x10 masonite boards for the project.  And that's not even all of them - it's about 80.  Pretty dang intimidating - but also cool to think that I'm going to cover every one of them!

Thursday, December 16, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 11

Day: 11 "Gunk Bug":
For this piece, I had nothing in mind except that I wanted to just gunk on thick, semi-dry paint that was left on my palette from previous works.  I came up with this cool alien-bug-creature.  The piece was very hard to photograph with my limited equipment, but it worked out ok - you can see the thick texture.  A fun little experiment.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 10

Day: 10 "Frosty Fiend": 
What's Christmas without Frosty?  I'm seldom intentionally humorous with my work, but friends tell me that I occasionally do something funny or tounge-in-cheek - I think this piece qualifies.  I personally think piss snow makes a great snowman and that a Head-cicle is hilarious!  Happy Holidays!

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 09

Day: 09 "Skuzzy Santa": 
Just getting into the Christmas spirit -Baxa style!!  Do you believe in all these years I've never painted a disgusting decrepit depraved Santa?  Well here he is!  Merry Frickin' Xmas!  This Santa has seen better days and I don't think you want your kids sitting on his lap!  Tomorrow: get ready for Frosty! (snicker

Monday, December 13, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 08

Day: 08 "Mutant Rising":
My intent with this piece was to play around with lotsa spindley lines to create a sinewy muscles and wierd wrinkles.  But I discovered something that prevented that.  I used Kilz, a primer for home use to prime my masonite boards instead of Gesso because it was already thin enough to brush on smoothly and didn't need sanding after 2 coats.  It works fine, but it's pretty absorbant.  I usually coat my boards with a flat color of acrylic paint so I'm not painting on white, but I didn't for this piece and the primer was too absorbant for me to work the paint the way I intended.  The piece still came out cool, but in a different way.  I learned something about my process though: if I want to do the slippery paint, sinewy effect, I need to coat the primed board with acrylic or clear medium first.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 07

Day: 07 "Screamin' Greenie":
I was working on a painting not too long ago with lotsa greens and since then I've wanted to do a green version of the screaming skull.  I like the color palette and how the jawbone fades to black.

I did a red one about a year and a half ago (which I used in the 99 Paintings Logo).  That 4 in. x 6 in. red skull actually kicked off this whole idea in a lot of ways.  I was working on a card painting and had some paint left on the palette and just felt like mushing some paint around.  I hadn't done a painting for myself in quite a while and I just kinda let loose and the piece came out really nice.  I did about 6 more small paintings (all in my Blood Rituals art book) and thought that it could be cool to do a series.  And now I am!

Week 01:  So it's been 7 days of the 99, and I've realized that this process is a lot more time consuming than I thought it would be.  I kept thinking that each painting would take 2 hours and that's not so bad.  But I forgot about prepping the boards, mixing oil paints, doing a sketch, photographing the art, creating the jpegs and webpages, and uploading everything.  Phew!  Plus, I kinda have to stay ahead of things so things have time to dry, like when I mount a sketch with matte medium or for the oil paint to dry so I can varnish the painting before shooting the photo.  I'm still a little frantic with the process and find that I'm just doing a painting each day just to stay on schedule, and not really getting into it yet or trying too many new things.  But I figure I'll get into a groove soon and will have time for all that soon.  I hope.



99 Paintings in 99 Days for $99 Project:  Tom Baxa has challenged himself to do a painting a day for 99 consecutive days and post them on BaxaArt.com and his Deadspeak blog.  Each 8x10 painting will be sold for $99, and prints for $9.99.  Baxa will be exploring different subject matters and mediums, including digital, and experimenting with artistic expression.



Saturday, December 11, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 06

Day: 06 "Sweaty Clown":
You don't want this creep at your birthday party, sweating all over the place because he didn't have his morning shot of Jack with the DTs are hitting him hard !  There's nothing scarier to a kid than a vile clown with an angry disposition.  That's what we have here.  I wanted to try to capture the gunky nature of make-up by using thick paint and dabbing strokes.  I love when hair gets sweaty and sticks to the make-up and mascara starts to run and white face paint clumps onto everthing.  Fun stuff!  - Tom
 

Friday, December 10, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 05

Day: 05 "Skull, metal": 
Nothing too groundbeaking on this painting.  I was having so much fun painting skulls, that I thought I'd do another.  I made this one thick, chunky metal.  Horizontal 10 w x 8 h.  - Tom


99 Paintings in 99 Days for $99 Project:  Tom Baxa has challenged himself to do a painting a day for 99 consecutive days and post them on BaxaArt.com and his Deadspeak blog.  Each 8x10 painting will be sold for $99, and prints for $9.99.  Baxa will be exploring different subject matters and mediums, including digital, and experimenting with artistic expression.



Thursday, December 9, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 04

Day: 04 "Vamp": 
I had these dark blue greys on my pallette and thought I'd play with some smokey eye make-up.  It went a little dark in the photo, but came out pretty cool, especially in contrast to the light hazel irises.  I like the glossy/glittery eye make-up that is often used with smokey eyes and with a little gloss on the lips, the look is complete. - Tom



99 Paintings in 99 Days for $99 Project:  Tom Baxa has challenged himself to do a painting a day for 99 consecutive days and post them on BaxaArt.com and his Deadspeak blog.  Each 8x10 painting will be sold for $99, and prints for $9.99.  Baxa will be exploring different subject matters and mediums, including digital, and experimenting with artistic expression.



Wednesday, December 8, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 03


Day: 03 "DripFace":
In my continual effort to loosen up, I worked hard to not overwork this piece.  I worked quickly, dragged dry paint and dripped solvent and thinned paint so that it would run over the image and bring unexpected results.  Some of the subtleties of the drips don't show up much on the jpeg, but I like some of the things that came out. 

Sometimes color alone can be used to bring context to a piece.  I used red paint (along with the dripping effect), to allude to blood without actually painting a bloody mouth.

Side note: I sold the first of the 99 Paintings last night - Day 01:Sold!



99 Paintings in 99 Days for $99 Project:  Tom Baxa has challenged himself to do a painting a day for 99 consecutive days and post them on BaxaArt.com and his Deadspeak blog.  Each 8x10 painting will be sold for $99, and prints for $9.99.  Baxa will be exploring different subject matters and mediums, including digital, and experimenting with artistic expression.



Tuesday, December 7, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 02


Day: 02 "Armored Slayer":
This painting was all about that thin ray of light hitting his head.  I recently did a painting with knights in plate mail in warm sunlight and I wanted to capture that light in this painting.  I also had fun designing the character and his armor.  I was trying to be much looser with my marks, but I ended up tightening up as I painted.  Something to work on.  I did achieve some interesting shapes in the armor, especially on his arms with simple brushstrokes and without thinking too much about the outcome.  In the end, I really like this guy - he slays me!  Tom



99 Paintings in 99 Days for $99 Project:  Tom Baxa has challenged himself to do a painting a day for 99 consecutive days and post them on BaxaArt.com and his Deadspeak blog.  Each 8x10 painting will be sold for $99, and prints for $9.99.  Baxa will be exploring different subject matters and mediums, including digital, and experimenting with artistic expression.



Monday, December 6, 2010

99 Paintings: DAY 01



Day: 01"Skull, WarmGlow"
Let the games begin!  Well I've decided to embark on a little project to help me grow as an artist and explore some ideas and techniques in paint.  I'm going to paint 99 Paintings in 99 Days for $99! and discuss each piece on my newly launched Deadspeak Blog.  Today is Day 01!

Each 8x10 painting will be sold for $99 + shipping, and I'm also offering 8.5 x 11 prints for $9.99 on the 99 Paintings page on my website BaxaArt.com .  You can go there to see a larger image of the painting and to purchase.  It's going to be awesome when I get a whole bunch of them on there!

I’ll be exploring various subject matters, painting techniques and mediums.  I'm also going to do some digital painting and photo montage. My goal is to grow as an artist, while pushing the boundaries of my own aesthetic and artistic expression. The painting sessions will be limited to 2 hours and will likely yield some works that are fully rendered, some studies, and some sketches in paint.  I'm sure some will kick butt, and some will fall a little short, but that's what learning is all about.

I’m going to paint zombies and monsters and demons and babes and all kinds of creepy, grotesque, and arabesque stuff.  Whatever strikes my fancy.  I might even paint a cute bunny rabbit -- NOT!

Today's Painting:  Skulls are amazingly fun to paint!  They have a complexity that is unexpected and lots of nooks and crannies to explore.  In this skull painting, I was focusing on a warm light and playing with warm and cool contrasts.  It's also one of my main goals to paint looser and chunkier, so I was using bold strokes and trying not to render too much and still get the forms across.  Hope you like it! - Tom



99 Paintings in 99 Days for $99 Project:  Tom Baxa has challenged himself to do a painting a day for 99 consecutive days and post them on BaxaArt.com and his Deadspeak blog.  Each 8x10 painting will be sold for $99, and prints for $9.99.  Baxa will be exploring different subject matters and mediums, including digital, and experimenting with artistic expression.