And the octopus is done! Small child included for size comparison.
Flamingo wearing Chucks
Continuing my theme of making stuff out of wood, here's a flamingo. I think it's whimsical. Made of repurposed pallet wood, copper wire, beads and paint. I didn't think realistic feet would look good, so this guy got some sneakers.
The logistical challenges of painting 18 square feet of octopus.
I was recently commissioned to paint a 6 foot by 3 foot octopus, which is great because I love painting sea creatures. It's a much larger version of an earlier work that I did. There are some unique challenges on something this big, namely acquiring the canvas, surface preparation, and shipping. Here is the original version of the painting, which was 12"x24"
Originally, I was going to buy a huge roll of canvas, cut off what I needed, then ship it to the client in a roll. The downside is that they would have to mount it themselves. My wife suggested I go with 3 smaller (but still very large) canvases. Ultimately, the client liked it so we're going with that. I'm now on day 3 of the project. Day one was buying materials and priming the surface. I had to do this in the garage to avoid making a huge mess in the house. Day 2 was sketching it out and doing the background, which is yellow fading into orange and then red. I've got a little touchup work to do thanks to our dog walking on the wet canvas (which I had to lay on the floor since it won't fit on my art desk) but I think it's going well. The boring parts are done, next comes the fun part: painting the octopus. How it looks right now:
I will update once the finished project is done.
Welcome to Frankenburg Art! My first blog post:
Pretty excited to get this website up and running. I've had an Etsy site for a long time, but this is my first actual website. Lately, I've been doing a lot of woodworking. I like making stuff out of wood because there are no limitations on size/shape like you have when you're painting a canvas. You can make any shape you want. You are truly limited only by your imagination.
I've been using mostly reclaimed wood from pallets that businesses have discarded. It's a lot of hard work breaking the pallets apart and you end up breaking/splitting a lot of wood. However, you end up with wood that has character you can't get at Home Depot/Lowe's. The imperfections like nail holes, residual paint, little cracks, etc. are an important element of the finished product.
That being said, I'm not straying too far from my comfort zone, yet. Mostly I've been doing crab, fish, and cacti, which has been the main focus of my work for a while now. I use a scroll saw to cut everything out, then I use paint, beads, nails, screws and generally anything else I have laying around to finish the piece. My garage workshop is a much messier and sweatier place than my nice air conditioned studio, but I love working out there.
