how i art

i found this, its old but you might get a kick out of it. some of you may have seen it. fuck you and read another blog

Hello, my name is Kirk Shelton. Today my office is freezing again since the sonsabitches are too cheap to fix the heater. So with freezing knuckles I type this. When I'm not having my soul sucked out at work or when I'm not rocking out with my cock out on the drums with my band The Few, I'm trying to make my girl happy. When I'm not doing those things I like to make art. I'm supposed to talk about my art and my art process but since I was never formally trained I'll just wing it. I'm not currently working on anything I can walk you through so I dug up some old crap. I hope it helps, more importantly I hope its entertaining. Like most people that do this shit I start out with a sketch. But for me, usually I dont wich is probably weird. Early on, like in High School Art class I'd get really angry that I had to draw stuff more than once. Arguing with my teacher "why do i have to draw it again, this one turned out fine?!" but now i know its helpfull that can just poop out an idea and then finish it later. For this lesson, I will walk you through a piece I call "Huffer". For the record I dont "huff" anything, or do any drugs for that matter. The idea for this came to me while I was sitting in my car getting my oil changed one hot afternoon. Sitting there breathing all the fumes from other cars, and whatever other chemicals the kids that work there spill on the floor. Sketchbook in hand, I scrawled this nugget. I let that rattle around in my head for a while and then decided to paint it up. I wanted to keep with the black and white look of the pencil on paper so i knew i didnt want a lot of color. I started with the background which i've been doing lately. I think I started with a green base and then layered a hand cut bug stencil all over with white and different shades of green. For this and all of my paintings I used Acrylic. I havent really fucked with oils yet. Seems like a pain in the ass. Anyway... yea its Acrylic. and the stenciling was done with an airbrush. sometimes I'll use spraypaint for the effect but not this time. Then with a pencil I roughly drew out the outline of the guy, the can, rag and some of the clouds. After that (trying to remember) I filled in the main areas of the white with a gesso and white mixture. The gesso keeps the white thin enough i can see my sketch but also primes it at the same time so when i go over later with white the pencil wont show through. Most of you probably already know this crap but I had to learn it all the hard way. So then I did all the black outlines with some crusty old black paint i have. I like this paint because its like thick paste that I can add water too and get it to a perfect thickness. again, theres probably a product meant for this but I'm cheap and uneducated. After all the lines are done i did a another thin layer of white for the fume lines, keeping them translucent. after that I just look for little touches of color or things i can add. then, bladow, its a painting. currently hanging in my kitchen. A lot of times i like to make a digital version of my stuff. In this case, just for fun I turned "Huffer" into a skateboard graphic. here's my process for that. After scanning I try to get the art to a contrast that i can get a good selection for the black and outlines. Making a long story short I redraw the outlines in Photoshop using a couple different methods. Then I start filling in the color and tweak shapes and crap. If i need to I'll move stuff around, like an arm or cloud depending on the piece I'm working with. tadaa! Then once It's done, I'll plop it into a skateboard template and add a logo or something. Since its all digital and semi vector I can use it for a sticker or shirt graphic. Well thats it. Thanks for letting me waste some time with you. For more of my paintings and drawings and other stuff you can check out my website kirksheltonart.com