Batman!!!!

A while back someone told me that painting batman was an experience not to be missed and everyone should do it at least once. So I decided to go back to the batman of my impressionable youth, the Michael Keaton incarnation. I wanted to do some research so I hired out Batman Returns. I only vaguely remember it so I figured it would be a bit of cinematic entertainment while I eat my dinner as well. It wasn't. That film was dreadful. The characters were dreadful. The story was dreadful. It had Christopher Walken in it. There was only one redeeming feature about the whole experience and it's right at the beginning when they first shine the bat signal into the sky which, through a series of carefully placed mirrors which swivel of their own accord, shines the bat signal into the library of Bruce Wayne, interrupting his own dinner.
At that point he leaps bodily from his chair and looks, with purpose, in the direction of... Somewhere and it's magnificent. The camera is below him, pointing right up his nostrils and emblazoned on the wall behind him is the silhouette of the bat signal.
It just sets up the near constant barrage of bullshit cheese that makes up the whole fucking movie. And its scored by Danny Elfman so on top of everything else, it sounds like an evening at the circus. Actually it sounds like an evening at the circus when the elephant has had a guts full and decided to make a break for it straight through the audience, stopping briefly to scrape its latest trainer off of the sole of its foot and then continue on through rush hour traffic.
But I digress.

This is an attempt to illustrate that glorious moment when Michael Keaton's hairdo takes centre stage. It is a completely failed attempt and looks like a freshly scraped elephant trainer I know but it's an interesting angle of his head and I have every intention of keeping at it until I get it right.
He looks fairly distinctive in his batman costume, I might have a go at that later as well.

Too much?

See, I don't know. I think I could go bigger. The renderings shit, sorry Neville, all your instruction goes out the door when my eyes start to defocus of their own accord.
I will say this for the record, for all the clean up involved, it's probably easier to just skip the liquefy tool and paint the buggers in.
I don't think I have this where I want it yet either. You know those really ugly babies that cry for hours and hours non stop, I kind of want the eyes to bulge out like that. I'm sort of going for the human chameleon hybrid condensed into a puppy thing. It'll get there.

Pinhead and puppy

So Pinhead's pretty much finished. At least his head is. I actually had this at a further stage. In this image the nails have only been gone over with the highlight once and there are no shadows from the nails at all. Earlier this afternoon I did another pass over the nails and then added in the shadows. To be honest it didn't add a lot to the image but it if you look for those sorts of things then you'd notice. Sadly, for some reason, I closed the file and it didn't save or I didn't save it. Which is unusual because if you make any changes at all such as turning on or off a layer it offers you a prompt asking if you want to save the changes. Whatever happened, I didn't save and lost the changes and I'm going to go stick my head in the freezer for a little for being such a fuckup.
Fortunately I have only lost a smidgen of work but I'm too tired to go through and redo it all now. Perhaps later.
Also this is a nicer rendering of the puppy idea and a small close up of the puppy. I sketched the puppy and then started to block in the values when I decided to make the eyes comically large. I did this using the liquefy tool which I often don't use as I feel its a good way to get lazy. But again, I'm pretty tired and I know that I can draw in the eye but I really wanted to see what it would look like with huge eyes and I wanted to see it quickly.


Ta daa! Although, now that I'm looking at it, they could still be bigger. Like huge saucer sized eyes
that take up most of his head.

 For anyone who doesn't know, this is Gary Vay ner chuck. He does a regular online wine tasting on http://dailygrape.com/ it used to be wine library tv but he evolved the format I think because he enjoyed it so much. Anyhow, he also wrote a couple of books. I haven't read the new one but the first one was called Crush It and was all about doing what you love and building it into something that you can do all the time. I really enjoyed it and his wine tastings are pretty funny as well, even if you don't drink wine. I'm quite happy with how this one's coming out. I want to start pushing my stuff so that its got a bigger focus on cartoony and funny rather than hyper realistic. All this endless fucking detail gets boring as hell. Seriously, if I'm going to render things out to that huge a degree then I may as well just start photo manipulation.
Maybe not, too many people going that way already.

Hell Bran?

Decided to scrap the pinhead on the toilet idea. Having him take a dump just didn't sit right, even if that expression just screams constipation. Having him eat cereal seems much more of a contrast. I'm not sold on the hell bran either. Seems a little corny and obvious. Still, it's late and it's been a long day and I'm drawing a blank as to a hellish parody of a well known breakfast cereal. Hell flakes? Lucifero's? Maybe it would just be better to not have it be a parody.
I might not even go with the breakfast cereal yet. There's a pony ride to explore yet. 

Still, I am enjoying painting his face, the black soulless eyes, the cuts in his face lifting up at the corners, the light bouncing off here there and everywhere. The gnashing of teeth. The grinding of bones. The wailing of widows. With any luck I'll get onto putting the nails on tomorrow. That'll be fun no doubt.

Even in hell

They could use more fibre in their diet. I just thought this might be fun to have a go at and I was right. Hooray for me. Actually it presents an interesting challenge because all those cuts in his face have to be lit up to make them read properly and the lighting source is coming from below which is something I've not done before.
Still lots to do on this one but the general idea is there. I'm going to have to do some work to figure out how to render leather underpants. I did think about making them frilly but that would be silly. On the toilet or not, I still want him to look bad ass.
Actually now that I look at it, I really need to fix up the direction of that chin.

I loathe daylight savings

Every year, twice a year I have to go through this shit. One goddamn hour backwards or forwards and my internal clock is ready to leap head first into oncoming traffic. And I mean the answer is simple. Boycott daylight savings right? I think I tried it once. It's not as simple as it sounds. I mean the clock on the car and the clock radio beside my bed are easy but my computer is hooked up to some sort of weird internal mechanism that automatically updates my time and if you want to try explaining to someone at Telecom that you'd like the daylight savings function on your cell phone removed then more power to you. I mean a lot of that stuff is outsourced and wherever those calls go, they just aren't trained to deal with things like an irate lunatic trying first to explain the concept of daylight savings and then trying to get them to join in a worldwide boycott of it.
Anyhow, this is Alan Rickman from the movie Galaxy Quest. One of the more enjoyable films I have seen in my life. Made all the more so because he's in it I'm sure. It is one of the few films that's just as enjoyable today as it was the first time I saw it.

Sir Ed for Charity

There's a gallery in Wellington that is holding a silent charity auction for Christchurch Earthquake Relief so I've been working on these two paintings as my submission. I may also include a WW1 pilot that I painted last year but we'll see. Originally I had intended to combine the paintings but instead of it looking like a passage of time thing, it looked like a father son portrait. Not really the effect I was after so I've decided to separate the images and list 'em that way.
Big fun. Especially the older guy. His neck was seriously something else. I have this one picture, it looks an old pink sock.