Commuter Painting

Now that I'm all done with school I am starting my summer schedule around here which includes many things like cleaning up the studio, getting rid of lots of old stuff like old worthless comics and paper---so much dam paper-the bane of the artist!

So I have tow big art projects this summer, the Martians Go Home comic and doing as many paintings as I can, and I'm starting with another paintings in my commuter series.

I snapped several pics with my cell phone while riding back and forth on the Market Frankford line on my way to and from school. I got pretty good at being very stealthy about doing it too, because if people see you taking their pic they get weirded out , self conscious or even mad and annoyed. You never know when A triple murder parolee escaped and is on the lame and doesn't want his picture taken.

I also like the distortions the phone makes and think that helps with the feeling of the paintings or atmosphere. so i combined the info from three different photos i snapped into this one drawing and had them open in photoshop and then sketched from them as if i was actually sitting on the train, that way I think I avoid one of the drawbacks to the use of photos which is the ocular vision of the camera and it's distortion of space. This also requires me to do more drawing "in the round' as opposed to tracing the flat forms of the photo, I can alter and fix shapes as needed.


the next step was to do a ink wash over the drawing like I did in the Vincent Desiderio workshop, the difference is I didn't then cover he whole painting in Shellac like we did in the workshop. So now that the warm Grisaille is done I can now start the actual painting with oils. I'll post the progress as I go along.