What the hell am I doing besides blogging?

A number of things actually.
But mainly, preparing a workshop on acrylic mediums and gels and their bountiful uses.
Which means I'm upstairs in my studio making demo samples.
I have until Tuesday at 6 p.m.
Right now, I'm watching paint dry. Really, the workshop won't be as boring.


Moving on...

You know those random, stupid thoughts you have right before or as something bad is happening? Thoughts that, if the situation were not so dire, would be really funny?
Like if you slip in the shower, you think "God, I hope I don't seriously hurt myself, because the paramedics will find me naked." Or, "I'm glad I already finally shaved my legs, so when they find me dead they'll at least know I was maintaining my feminine appeal." Or, "I wonder if people actually crap themselves after they die, in which case I'm glad I'm at least in the bathroom for this."


Yeah, those thoughts.




(Because that's what that cartoon is about, duh.)
(And that's where I got the name for this blog, duh-er.)

Not a dinosaur. Sorry.

This is just a painting I did over the summer... Playing with layering acrylics and color, and using different tools to apply paint. Squeegee. Scrubbing away with steel wool. And of course, knife. Very rudimentary, 8x10 canvas over wood. My favorite part is the parts you can't see here, the edges that are dripping with colors.

Because paintings have sides, you know.

Spiders. Thera-flu. Hallucinations likely.

Before I begin, let me just state that I am coasting on thera-flu right now, so you might want to just not read this if you don't want to hear me babble about my paralyzing fear of spiders..

Spiders. Yeesh.
I had to search wikipedia to provide you with a general visual and scientific names and such of today's topic: cellar-spiders.

Story:
My Dear Housemate and I were talking, and I turned on the bedside lamp to read. Inside of the lampshade was one of these spiders. Just like in Arachnophobia. I saw that movie when I was... young, and frankly I still check every lamp most of the time. At my parent's house and at the house I'm at now, I have suspect lamps that I check more often for spiders, but anyway.

I told my friend that there was a spider in the lamp, and he walked across the room.
"Huh," he said. "Yup."

Later on, I insisted he kill the spider. Or relocate it. Just get it out of my lamp! But he asked why I couldn't do it myself. It wasn't hurting me in the lamp, he said. And I squash ants all the time, come on, I can handle a spider.
No. Ants don't even see you coming. Spiders know! They have eight eyes. And fangs. And two more legs than ants, so they are faster. I probably didn't say all of this out loud, but it was deeply embedded in my squash first, ask questions later reasoning. Also, I didn't want to burn myself on the lightbulb.
And finally, I played the gender card. It was his duty to kill the spider, he's the man. I played this a lot in college with my manly housemates as well. It worked, sometimes.

I guess the cellar-spider thought this was sexist or something, because after the argument was over and it seemed like I won (he was going to put it out on the porch), the spider was nowhere to be found. Just packed up and moved the entire house! No web, even!

What a wasted victory.

Making work...

So, now that my studio is (haphazardly) set up, I can begin making work. Work as in think art and work as in cartoons...

Tonight I have been working on the latter. Whenever I start a cartoon, I generally start a whole bunch at the same time. I have to paint backgrounds and let them dry reasonably before putting in the action. So it all works in a cycle, but depending on how much medium I use, I need to wait a day in order to actually make a cartoon.

As of now, on the butyl covered floor of my studio, I have two green paintings, a blue painting, and a red painting on stretched canvas. And then 3 red stained pieces of linen taped down on a drawing board.

Eventually, somewhere in the mix will be a duck news anchor, a chameleon, a number of dinosaurs... Maybe seven cartoons will be born in the next few days.
I did about 20 pages of sketches and got about 3 good ideas out of them... Maybe 4.

A blog is born!

Greetings, if there's anyone out there...

After sitting on the edge of weblogs and also sitting on a long unused gmail account, I decided to venture back into a web existence, that I left behind a long time ago in the fields of diaryland and livejournal. You know, when posts became mundane reports of what I had done that day. Let's just say, I'm glad I deleted them.

I am a painter, sculptor, artist, illustrator, blah, blah, blah, and I decided to initiate Famous Dinosaurs in order to keep myself motivated. To have unspoken goals that needed to be fulfilled because a blog needs to be updated, that's just how it is.

And also, to entertain, because who doesn't like cartoons about animals? And sometimes aliens?

There was debate over which painting I would have accompany my first post, but a swift decision was made that it had to be a dinosaur, considering the name of this blog...