He's Behind You!

The third in my Pinky Dandy Myspace/Facebook pic series, this one was taken unexpectedly with a camera phone by Iggy, Pinky's pet emu.

I'm Back (In...Pink?)

At long last, I am back. This has really been the year from hell, or rather a really bad and depressing book of my life that is finally over. Not my life, the author's depression or sadism or whatever it was that made them want to write about my dog dying right after I graduated college, my dismal long-distance relationship as I lived with my parents in suburbia for a year and waited for Martyn to get out of Savannah, my Dad's cancer incident, the horrific jobs, job hunting, and job transitioning, various family drama, Martyn's also difficult job hunt, and finally the battle with Martyn's parents to cosign for him so we could move into the apartment (which was only defeated by Devon's father who swooped in out of the blue and handled it before we had to wait another minute for them to cooperate.) Now we are IN THERE and it's FUCKING AWESOME. After we had already waited a year just to be together we decided not to rush into things and settle for the first place we saw. Martyn was, after all, still looking for a job at that point. So we had a look around and didn't even have to look that far until we found THE ONE. It's a mile from my work and right behind Little Five, which was the major thing. We don't even have to drive there if we don't feel like it--which is super convenient because Martyn now works at Junkman's Daughter. Our place was built in the 50's, so even though it's an apartment it feels like one of my old houses--hardwood floors that squeak, firestone-mug-green tiles in the bathroom, black and white checkered floor in the kitchen, brass doorknobs, clumpy white lead paint in the windowsills and everything. We painted it before we moved all our stuff in with bright, solid comic book colors. We even got a retro 1950's diner bar table and chairs and a cat clock with a swinging tail to go in our smurf-blue kitchen. Everything about our place is completely badass, even our shower curtain (which is covered with classic Sailor Jerry tattoo flash.) Our living room is green, our art room is bright yellow (WE HAVE AN ART ROOM), our bedroom is fire engine red with black and white striped bedding. Everywhere you look there are action figures, fairies, posters, CDs and records. I love it. Anyway...

Now that I'm getting my own life back I plan on creating more artwork. If you recall, this one's been on hold ever since before I got my new job (which is going well, thanks for inquiring.) It only needed another like ten minutes left until it was finished, but chaos pretty much ruled over everything until now. So here it is. More soon to come.

New Job

So if you couldn't guess from my lack of posts over the last month, I got the job! My ingenious plan of standing out against the other applicants and actually making a "chalkboard sign" out of a piece of black foam core (I painted it to look like it had a three dimensional wooden frame around it and everything) as part of my application apparently worked really well. Since I had applied at Trader Joe's before and had really gotten the feel for their aesthetic, I just mimicked that on the board--the lettering, the placement of the "product" (i.e. me) and the price, the colors, etc. I even lifted a few things from their website, like the vintage pub sign pointing hand motif. The message read something like: Bailey Quillin--reliable, creative, 100% organic, hire me! I researched some art nouveau posters, Indian art, and Victorian etchings for inspiration. Brian Webster found it amusing and hired me a few days later. He didn't even mess around with my pay--I now make $3 an hour more than I did at Arvid, have more hours, and soon will have medical and dental as well.

I was totally busy and exhausted at first because for two weeks I was working both jobs with no days off at all. Trader Joe's needed me to start right away so working at the cabin on my few off days was the most "notice" I could possibly give Arvid. It worked out well though, because on my last day there we found out the paint we had been using for the corks contained a dangerous toxin that has already been banned in the state of California and can only be handled in outdoor spaces for short periods of time while wearing a full body suit and gloves. We of course had been painting in a basement with no warning, no masks, and no gloves. The ventilation system they have in the studio is for oil paints (larger air particles) so the filter was useless against this stuff. We actually left early that day because Heather, the new studio assistant that had been hired the week before, finally broke down after having severe headaches, breathing problems, and disorientation since day one. This happened to coincide with Maggie and Tye feeling ill all the way up on the third floor from nasea, headaches, and feeling like their "eyes were popping out." That was the day we decided to research what they had given us to work with on the internet and evacuate the premises until further notice. Lucky for me I got to evacuate forever. Plus, when I stopped at the Starbucks down the road to try and get rid of my headache, I ran into Francisco, a friend I used to work with at Outback that I hadn't seen since and was oddly just wondering what had happened to him moments before. It was meant to be, and we hung out a few times since. It was a nice distraction to have while dealing with my Dad's surgery, which went as well as possible, by the way. He is now out of the hospital and on his way to recovery. He's got to recover; I bought him a gift card to go hangliding in Chattanooga and that requires some physical exertion.

So between my infinitely better new job, my Dad's surgery, and a random couple of visits from Martyn to see a Spinal Tap concert (awesome) and Devon to wish that she lived here, I've been pretty distracted. I am probably going to be for the next few months actually as Martyn sporadically visits to find a job so we can find a place and move in together. He's arriving this Thursday actually, to stay for a week of searching. Hope it goes well. In the meantime I worked a smidgeon on that second Pinky Myspace photo, and hope to do more soon. First there was the watercolored version that I spoke of (blank white spaces have been cleaned up digitally):


And here's the painting with the base colors blocked in. That's all I have so far.

Teddy

So I finished that painting of Teddy. It's on watercolor board, which I have never used before but I found out that I really like it. Unfortunately it was a bit too big and bulky to put in my scanner. So here's a crappy photo of it instead:



I also watercolored the background of Pinky Dandy's second internet whoring photo this weekend. I had previously scanned in the painted version to begin the whole tweakage process, but then Photoshop had to go and quit unexpectedly so I lost everything I had done so far. Thankfully it wasn't that much. I am at work now so I can't re-scan it at the moment, but here's the penciled version anyway:


Tomorrow morning I have an interview arranged with Brian Webster, the manager of Trader Joe's in midtown Atlanta for the position of in-store sign artist. Man I hope I get it.

Pinky Myspace Photo #1

Here's Pinky's first profile picture for Myspace and Facebook. I am going to try to do one of these a week, so this week's already taken care of. This weekend I am going to paint a portrait of a neighbor's corgi, Teddy. He is recently deceased due to pretty tragic circumstances and he was like a son to this lady, who doesn't have any actual children. A few neighbors went in and commissioned me to do a painting of Teddy for her. I'm thinking watercolors because they are by far the most delicate and sentimental medium. So that's my next project-within-a-project.

Pinky Dandy In A Swimsuit

Last night after Paige and I went to Blick for some art supplies and had dinner at Yama Sushi, I painted a scenic watercolor of the beach, scanned it into my computer, and messed around with it a bit. I am fiddling with a new style that combines my digitally colored characters with my more serious watercolor paintings that everyone loves so much. When I used to be in Maher Yacoub's class all he ever did was make me paint watercolor landscapes so that he could steal them after I had thrown them out. This isn't even the first time this has happened, I also had a teacher in middle school that wanted one of my watercolors out of the trash. I always thought they were alright, but honestly what was I going to do with a million paintings of trees. Maher usually would ask if he could keep my stuff, but not always. A few of my drawings mysteriously went missing a while back and Maher claimed that he never saw them or that he didn't know what I was talking about. Whatever, he can keep them for being such a cool guy.

Anyway, I don't know what's so great about my watercolors but they are fun to do and probably the easiest way to for me to paint backgrounds. They are also great for getting realistic colors in landscapes. The only issue I have with watercolors is that they are often a bit too somber for my characters. Most of my characters are solid, vivid colors, and lot of them have bright pink or magenta somewhere on their person. I guess that's just me wanting to interject my favorite color over everything. When you try to get a good pink with watercolor it never really works; it's always too red or too peach. When it comes to PINKY Dandy there is no excuse for this. So lately I have just been saying "fuck it" and coloring my characters digitally. Something about the slickness of digital combined with the sporadic-ness of watercolor fascinates me. I don't know if it looks "good," but it does definitely look interesting. Sort of like a reference to cell shading in animation, where the characters were really solid and the backgrounds were these wispy works of art. This is my first attempt at whatever this is:


A little weird looking, but I think I like it. I'm not sure. If I decide that I don't like it later on, I have a plan B: Dr. PH Martin's concentrated watercolor dyes. They are way brighter than normal watercolors because they've got a hellofalot more pigment. I picked up a bright pink yesterday in case I decide to do the rest of the Pinky Facebook photos completely traditionally. Then I will lament about having to ink everything. Pinky, along with all of my other characters, looks better as a sketch than inked. I think my pencil drawings have awesome line weight and a sporadic quality that I would hate to lose to the carefulness of an ink-over. And they would also not have that nifty super-opaque coloring that they do digitally. Damnit, I am thinking about this far too much. So look at Pinky in a swimsuit instead. Isn't he a dreamboat?

Paige and I are taking pictures of Doll tomorrow if all goes to plan. In the meantime here is Marc Bolan's handwriting.


Someone posted a bunch of crap he wrote on Facebook. I love how he spells 'magick'. The lettering reminds me of Norse runes. Sometimes his writing was more loopy than pointy, especially when he was writing about how drunk and/or hungover he was in his old diary from when he was Mark Feld and/or Toby Tyler. He often spells things phonetically or incorrectly to the point where you are not sure what is an accident and what is purposeful. Also I love how he dots his i's with circles. I do that too, and I get a lot of crap for it. My writing is really curvy, but I write really similarly to this way when writing in dramatic all caps; jagged lightning bolt 'S's and everything. Marc and I also both use parenthesis all over the place and would put explosion lines around otomatopias of loud sounds written in all caps in our old diaries, comic book style. Most of Marc's sentences have nothing to do with grammar at all and read more like song lyrics than anything. I could relate to his stuff so much that I translated some of it to the girl that posted it, who had no idea what it said. I just have such a weird connection to Marc, and I probably will never understand why.

Here in this story from his childhood Marc says he's a fairy. In a supernatural being way; not a homosexual way. Doesn't that explain so much? He was a changeling and I knew it all along.

The Creation Of Doll And The Return Of Pinky

Here I am again, back from a fun weekend and ready to post all of the crap I have been working on between friend visitations and my joke of a full-time job. I will bitch about that some more on Myspace whenever I can, but for now I am too furious to talk about it and will only say that cleaning up after stupid rich people has been taking up a lot of my time over the past week. Therefore I am running a bit behind on these posts so you get to be bombarded by a ton of pictures in this blog as I try to catch up. It's better than nothing though, right? (Rhetorical question.)

As mentioned in my last blog, I've started drawing Pinky Dandy again to refresh my memory of his strange proportions. I am doing this because I think it's about time that Pinky gets Facebook (and possibly Myspace,)so he will need to have some profile pictures. I mean if my Dad and his old college friends and Yoko Ono all have Facebook then there is pretty much no excuse for Pinky Dandy not to have it. Enough people know of him that he'd probably end up with more friends than me. All I have so far is some sketches that I did to get back into the groove. They're not great, but they were helpful.

The classic facial expressions sketch dump:


Pinky full body shot, looking ticked off as usual:


And then there's this one. I know this pose doesn't make any sense; I was just trying to get a feel for how his body bends. It almost looks like he is dancing. Lamely.


The other project I am working on is my Glam Fairy #4, Doll. He's just a sweet transvestite from New York that's lookin' for a kiss. I saw these fabulous sparkly shoes at Plato's closet in my size (trannie medium,) and it was at that moment that Doll came to me. He was also inspired by The New York Dolls, Rocky Horror, Moulin Rouge, Emily Howard from the show Little Britain, some other unconvincing transvestites in my Mick Rock Glam book, and old-timey Burlesque fashion. This was the first sketch I did of him, before he even had wings:


Then I later I designed his wings to go with the whole red and black corset theme:


Last I tried to figure out a pose. Something classic and pinup because he is inside an enormous glittery pink shoe, after all. I bullshitted this drawing but I just wanted to get the general idea down:


I had already gathered some supplies from Joann's a while back--red and black lace, feathers, trim, etc. This week I started on the armature. It's just twisted wire and that magical farenheight epoxy putty from Home Depot. Here the shoe is pictured in the background:


And here is Doll's 'skeleton' inside of the shoe:


This was Doll will the first layer of Sculpey. I have started baking my sculptures after finishing each area instead of just doing it all in one complete trip to the oven. That way I can sort of 'save' what I have done before I move on, especially when working with super soft and melty clay. His skin color is a bit strange because it's elephant gray Sculpey III and Dolphin Studio by Sculpey mixed together because I couldn't make up my mind. I like it though.


I decided he looked somewhat womanly with the narrow chest and round butt, so tonight I built up his pecs and sculpted the rest of his arms and legs. The point is that he is not a very convincing crossdresser.


Here is Doll in that shoe again. He's gotten so buff lately that he hardly fits anymore. Will have to get creative with the pose.


Last I will leave you with a little treat. I don't know why, but I always love my fairies' butts. They're so cute!

Stella And The Flab Four

I said that I would post these things, so here they are: Stella and the Flab Four. I've also been working on some profile pictures of Pinky Dandy for his future Facebook and Myspace page. So far I've just got some in-progress sketches. It's basically just been a crazy week of going to Savannah during St. Pattie's Day weekend so Paige could get a puppy and then going back to work and finding out that it sucks and I need to quit (more details than you even want to know in my Myspace blog, since that has become the designated bitchin' spot.) Now Devon is visiting for the weekend and we're staying with Paige to give my Dad and his cancer some space. Martyn is also coming up for the weekend tomorrow. I will still try to draw while they're here. Ok, TRY. I'm not promising anything, ok?

The Flab Four:


Martyn laughs the hardest whenever he looks at Paul. I guess it is sort of amusing how excited he is about that hamburger.

Stella, Paige's fat and dumb cat:

And this is the hideous side of her: