it is always bastille day with mr. le hors.

my love for you is a stampede of horses just alerted me to this crazy beautiful book of firework studies by pierre le hors.

isn’t it fun forcing other people to look at your vacation photos?  you know what’s MORE FUN?  making people read your vacation comic book!  yay!

when we go on exciting trips, the comic book comes too.  every day is illustrated right before i go to sleep, which means every illustration in drenched in sleepy sloppiness because all that adventure is kinda exhausting.  vacation comic books, though, are exactly 30,000 better at helping remind me of our trips… even when they involve sea snakes and mating sea turtles and ear infections from satan.  you can’t photograph ear infections and my camera isn’t fast enough to photograph sea snakes and mating sea turtles – but being in the comic book is vacation memory IMMORTALITY.

wanna see mine?

30 Canvases in 30 (or 6) Days Art Challenge

deadlines are fun!  i view them like dares.  can i write a brilliant paper in 8 hours?  can i prepare a lecture in twenty minutes?  can i draw detailed diagrams of the nuclear signaling pathways of cryptochrome 2 before my meeting in an hour? yes, yes, yes! ready go!

which is why i love the 30 day challenge so very much.  last year i painted all 30 canvases in 3 days.  even i realized this was absurd.  this year, i decided to sleep a little and paint them all in 6 days – much better!  also, i was simultaneously writing a grant proposal and a thesis proposal as well as organizing an overnight biology field trip and packing for an international vacation.  too bad i can’t get paid for multi-tasking.

wanna see a few of my faves for the show?  themes involved: ponies, glitter, ocean, glitter, bicycles, and glitter.  Its opening December 1st if you’d like to come!

 

glowing fireflies and meat-plants.

I just finished a painting for the Artist & Craftsman’s Glow Show – you should stop by any time this month!  Any opportunity to play with things that glow in the dark is a good one, and I decided to up the complicatedness by also making little clay lightning bugs and embed them in resin inside the painting.  I am still not convinced this was a good idea, but it was s u p e r fun.

LESSONS LEARNED FROM THIS PROJECT:

1. any inherently messy person (exhibit a: me) painting with glow-in-the-dark paint will unknowingly end up with it everywhere.  i went to bed last night thinking i was in a crime scene investigation.

2. resin has wanderlust.  sticky spots abound.

3.  dealing with resin means your house will smell like a meth lab for 72 hours.

mr. dan mccarthy and his paleobsession.

i love dinosaurs.  i love forests.  i love secrets.  i love skeletons.  i love anything that glows in the dark.  can you imagine the level of glee, dear readers, when i first saw dan mccarthy’s new print?  its got just the right amount of new perspective to make you feel adventurous just by looking at it.

extra bonus: whose eyes do you think you are looking through?  what could possibly be brave enough to be deeper in a cave fulla dinosaur skeletons except for a BIGGER, FIERCER JUST-OUTTA-SIGHT DINOSAUR?

ms. rachel caldwell and her hairiness.

rachel caldwell is really good at drawing hair.  that doesn’t seem very impressive until you realize that hair is full of lots of fine lines that overlap and intersect and maze themselves out.  ms. caldwell’s got it down.  observe.

things i just made.

folks, did you know screenprinting is super awesome?  did you know its even awesomer with glow-in-the-dark ink?!  i know, i can hardly believe i know how to something so great myself.  if you’re in seattle, get yourself over to the vera project for their amazingly cheap class right away.  i’m so excited about how much knowledge they gave me that i’m feeling like i need to give them a little donation.  what fantastic folks those vera project people are!

anyways, i’ve had a patron commission me for two swimming scottie dog paintings over the past few weeks.  this is why i love commissions – why else would i paint sharks and terriers together?  how else would i realize that painting kelp is super fun?  these little guys were done in 2 hours tops.  quick paintings = cheap paintings.

insane watercolor blending with krylon.

just ran across french group csx’s flickr set of some gorgeous  graffiti.  this crew has the lion’s share of rattlecan talent.

these first pieces are from zoer…

 

kryo’s in that crew too – he put up this lovely little bit of paint for you to see.

bumber by number at bumbershoot this weekend.

bumbershoot, seattle’s all-consuming music-visual art-comedy-film-performance festival, used to cost $12 to get in back in the olden days.  now it’s a bank account massacre over there – $45 makes my wallet cry.  but i’m going, gawddammit, because there’s some insanely fantastic art in there and its worth the ramen dinners to see it.

flatstock in all its doe-eyed, heart-rate-increasing, butterflies-in-the-stomach beauty is my favorite thing to ever happen.  ever.  every time.   last year my arm brushed against jay ryan (s w 0 0 n).  i actually built up the courage to say hi to daniel danger.  i nearly dolphin-squealed when i saw all of dan mccarthy‘s prints there IN PERSON.  ohmigoodness.  awesome.

but i’m almost equally thrilled about bumber by number, where artists take paint-by-number canvases and make them awesome.

here’s lisa petrucci‘s cute lil number…

 

and here’s the ever-impressive mary iverson….

the before-and-after vivisection from janet galore…

 

and my mostest favorite – ponies with opinions about finance from aaron huffington.  thanks, slog.

the most epic piece of printed material ever.

so, my post about two and a half seconds ago lavished love onto mr. josh cochran.  that was before i saw this. 

prepare yourself for…. the battle between unicorns and zombies.  yes, you read that correctly.

i know, i know.  i can’t stop looking at it either.  it’s made up of dreams.