Before you say that Bentham looks pretty nasty, remember that he’s been dead almost 200 years. I doubt I will look so good 200 years from now. Waiting for him to dry is taking ages because the paint’s so thick, but I couldn’t add any real highlights to it because the red paint just ate up any color.

Divine’s a mess, too, but I have to finish a commission before I do any real work on these.

Augie caught his first bird in the yard today. Here’s a photo of him with a dead sparrow in his mouth. I gave him a cerulean background because his brother has a alizarin crimson background. I do love bright colors, yes.

Also pictured are some of the many store bought canvas frames that I ripped the canvas off of. I haven’t been to the mall so I haven’t been able to cover them. Still waiting for my gesso to come in the mail, too. Meanwhile, I actually have about 7 more good quality canvases lying around the place, so there is not a shortage of painting surfaces. Five of them are 16×20, though, and my comfort zone is about 11×14. Trying to branch out to other sizes.

And all of this after several discussions about the price of oil paints this week. I’ve really only used Winsor and Newton, so I had no idea what the really cheap paints were like. I understood the Winton has less expensive pigments and isn’t as bright, but I love cadmium yellow so much that I don’t care if it costs more. Anyway, my mom picked up some really, really cheap oils in a set of 10 and now I know why I don’t use them: it’s not just that the pigments are cheap and they aren’t pigmented enough, but they aren’t pigments evenly, either, between colors. When I try to mix a color, the results are sometimes very surprising. Flesh tones are the worst. I mixed some colors I’d normally use and it ended up a dark orange. The white was too transparent and the yellow ochre was rather yellow. Anyway, done with those. I’ll keep the blacks and use them to paint the sides of canvases or something. The black is fine, actually.

I started a painting of Jeremy Bentham’s mummified head on a rectangular canvas and I’m regretting it; I should’ve used square. Now I have square from the ones I ripped apart, but I am wondering if it’s worth taking this off the stretchers. In any case, it’s completely wet with a lot of thick paint on it. I’m liking it so far, otherwise, because it will be very bright, saturated colors. Jeremy Bentham’s mummy always makes me smile for some reason. Other than that, waiting for parts of a commission to dry so I can finish it, varnish it, and ship it.

Per Ohlin, vocalist of black metal band Mayhem. From post mortem photo taken by Euronymous.

Per had a lifelong fascination with death, taking on the moniker “Dead” before taking his own life at age 22. He slit his wrists and throat, then shot himself in the head. Euronymous discovered the body, got a camera, and took photos. One ended up as a bootleg album cover, Dawn of the Black Hearts. In a letter to Slayer magazine, Euronymous claimed Dead did it because he was fed up with what the metal scene had become, but it seems likely it was due more to his own inner demons than a political statement.

oil on canvas, 11×14. Dead is for sale on etsy.

Meanwhile, doing another Divine, this time with a pig’s head. Dead is on 11×14, but my new canvases will be 16×20. If you’re gonna paint something grotesque, it may as well be fairly large, too.

Edit: Okay, ordered alizarin crimson, french ultramarine, and white tubes of paint, and some white gesso.

Nevermind the HP Lovecraft one, he’s just there because he’s also a WIP, but I talked about that in my last blog entry.

But I was thinking about doing a death series anyway, allows for use of interesting colors and textures. Nothing morbid about death, it happens to us all. (Argh, another lost opportunity for making bad puns about Dead. All three in the above unfinished paintings are deceased; yet only one is Dead.)

Last week I was watching something or other on Netflix, some true crime specials hosted by James Ellroy and saw a particular photo I hadn’t seen before of the Black Dahlia. But alas, a really awesome painting of that photo was already up on etsy and I couldn’t compete. Though I’d been planning to paint that picture, I decided to paint a different one. Then I started thinking about dead 22 year olds, which inevitably led to thinking about Per Olin’s brains splattered all over.

Though you can hardly tell, the top image of Betty Short is fairly tame compared to a lot of her post-mortem pics and will just be a closeup on her face. Despite the cutting across her cheeks, it’s not very gory. It’s also black and white, of course, so I will be making it bright and cheery and colorful.

The other things these have in common is that some people have called paintings I’ve done lifeless, so I dedicate these to those people. I never wanted to be a comic book artist. That’s a good thing for all of us.

Old Howard needs a lot of work, still, too. The important thing is having a large chin, and at least he has that. All photos of him are crappy and black and white, and I’m not sure of his eye color. They’re brown for now.

Took a few days off from this one to work on the Divine painting, because men in makeup are infinitely more fun to paint.

Now I’m thinking of doing a space background, rather than water, but keeping the one tentacle. Either with some nebulae or something, or colored sentient gases, with a large iridescent tentacle reaching out to grab him.