First of all, THANK YOU to everyone who came out to see me at CWOS this year! I'm really glad I did it and am happy with how things turned out. It provided some good feedback, more opportunities and plenty of inspiration. In fact, I was so inspired, the next day I went to the Leitner Observatory with some friends... It was open for a special White House event… whatever that was, we unfortunately never figured out. We watched the planetarium show, (pretty cool) and left after it ended. (We were told that the live feed from the WH was starting.) By the time we found a group of 4 chairs available and sat down, Obama had left the stage and everyone else around us got up out of their chairs and left the room lol. I still don’t know what the President talked about and why this was a special day. Ignorance is bliss, they say. However, I did get to look through a telescope for the first time!! It was cloudy of course, but among those clouds were some small patches of the night sky and the MOON! It was glorious with its large swaths of smooth patches next to fields of craters all packed on top of each other. It was a bright, luxurious texture I’d never seen or felt before. I really wanted to reach out and run my hands across it. So today is Halloween and here is a quick themed painting for all you fans of full moons...NOTE: I just painted a pretty bad werewolf. Maybe it's just cute, I haven't decided yet. Let me know in the comments below. It didn't turn out how I wanted it but sometimes you just have to move on!
I'm also attaching an old scratchboard drawing I did in college about 4 years ago. I figure this will redeem me if you don't like the werewolf, haha! Hi, I just wanted to send a quick reminder out that I am participating in New Haven's City Wide Open Studios on Saturday Oct. 17 and Sunday Oct. 18. I'll be at 153 East St (3rd Floor) New Haven, CT. The studio will be open from 12pm - 6pm and I will have a SALE going on!!! ;) I will have the above image available for a #cwos special of $20. (Normally it is $30) It is printed on archival luster paper at a size of 13"x19" using archival pigment inks that are rated to last around 100 years (before noticeable fading happens). I will also have individual 5"x5" prints of each planet available for $5 each. They are printed on the same (heavy) cold-press watercolor paper I used to paint the original planets. My #cwos special for these is going to be BUY 2 GET 1 FREE. They will fit into standard 5" matted frame from any big box store. This special will only be for the weekend. If you're interested and have any questions let me know. While you are out here don't forget to grab some of the world's best pizza and check out the other artists throughout the area. :D There are artists all over New Haven that are opening their doors just for you! Here is a link to the CWOS website. I just noticed they have my address wrong, but it is the same parking lot, I'm just on the other side; the correct address is 153 East St. It is on the 3rd floor. There are at least five other artists in the complex that I am at. I hope to see you there! If not have a great weekend :D and I'll talk to you soon.
I've never actually seen an eclipse before, despite my obsessive relationship with the night sky. I guess my love of sleep (and equal hate of lack-thereof) usually wins in that tug of war. Rather than burning the midnight oil with my art projects, I decided to venture out to the beach. My wonderful girlfriend Julia helped with the needed motivation to leave the apartment ;) It's amazing how I can hole myself up in there, for days at a time... not withstanding going to my day job. Anyways, it was well worth the effort. I think I was more amazed at how many other people were watching this celestial event than the actual eclipsing of the moon! I felt like I was apart of something very special. We sat down among a grouping of large rocks that crept into the sea ever so gently. At about 9:45, there was a bright white light shimmering off the waves. When I looked at the moon, it was just like staring into a 100 watt bulb. (I know because I do that sometimes, I don't recommend it) It was truly brighter than I had ever seen it before. After a half hour it disappeared into the shadow of our Earth. It was white no longer, but a red-orange glow remained. I imagine that's how Mars looks. (At least in all the movies, it does.) It's just a rock out in space, but it's OUR rock, and that's what makes it special. P.S. I just did that paint sketch quickly (maybe an hour at most, probably more like 30 minutes though) in the ArtRage program. I am spending most of my time on this planet project lately. I am doing watercolor paintings of all 8 planets and organizing them into a poster for sale at the City Wide Open Studios in New Haven. I have a watecolor of Jupiter in the ArtSpace gallery downtown, the reception is Friday at 5pm. If you're in the area I'd love to see you! I will have all of my paintings on display (as well as works and prints for sale) the weekend of the October 17th and 18th. I'll be at 153 East St. New Haven. Check out the flyer for more information and click here for the City Wide Open Studios website.
Sorry for the delay in posts. I've had to play landlord for the past month or so. Evicting people sucks. You think I'd learn my lesson on picking good tenants but sometimes circumstances are out of my control. Here's an illustration I did to show you how I found the room after the eviction. (It brought up some feelings I hadn't felt in a long time, so bear with me.)
I think I have compassion for people who have problems, me being one of those people. I was doing nearly the same thing in the same house as the person I had to evict, not seven years ago. Only I was doing cocaine off the bathroom sink. Different drug, still the same never-ending cycle of self-loathing followed by five, ten, or sixty minutes of... happiness - no, that's not the word... joy? No. Just feeling normal. Follow that with ten hours of severe depression. Try that everyday for a year, five years, ten years... You get the point. I'm a recovering alcoholic and drug addict if you haven't guessed it yet. (I don't really count the days or years but I know I haven't drank since Halloween of 2007. That's the easiest date to remember! All drugs were shortly thereafter.) I don't tell this to many people because believe it or not it isn't the best icebreaker and society hasn't actually made it easy for me to move past... my past. It's amazing how the ripples of my past keep disturbing the peace and serenity that I have come to enjoy since then. Here's an example: job applications asking me about arrest records and whatnot, yet only leaving the smallest box to explain my entire life story. Dear Employer, yes I was arrested for drugs. Yes, I got a DWI. Yes, it was over 8 years ago. Since then I have become an upstanding member of society. I managed to buy a dilapidated house, renovate it myself with no experience, and be a landlord/property manager for the past 7 years. I also got my degree in 3 years while commuting to school 2 hours everyday, 5 days a week, and maintained a full-time job and a GPA of 3.8.... For the next year and a half I struggled to find odd jobs to keep paying my mortgage because Starbucks wouldn't hire someone with a record. [It's many more than Starbucks, but that was the best example... I still love your double espresso Starbucks, I ain't that mad at ya ;) ] So... I just told you my deepest, darkest secret... and while it's taken me awhile to get to this point, I am okay with putting it all out there now. You can love me or hate me, I'll deal with either one just fine. I just know it has always helped me to see and hear about addicts coming out on the other side okay so maybe this will help someone else out there pull themselves out of that hole to see what life really has to offer them. And it truly is an amazing life! I take joy in the smallest things now. Just last week in Upstate NY while laying on a dock I saw the Milky Way for the first time! It was way up there millions of light years away, just like it always is, just a couple of small patches of sky a slightly lighter shade than the sky surrounding it. But seeing that was all it took to give me an awe-inspiring feeling. To think that we as humans are just the tiniest fraction of a fraction... and so on.. of what is actually out there in the universe and to know that we are apart of something so much bigger than us that we truly wouldn't' even be able to comprehend exactly what IT is if we saw IT. HOW AWESOME IS THAT? :D It appears that I've been doing something wrong. I hope you're use to that by now ;)
The last two emails were missing two videos. It looked pretty stupid to me so I'm sure it looked even weirder for you that I was referencing something that wasn't there... so I'm trying it again. This is just the two videos that didn't make it into the last couple emails... fingers crossed it works. I hope you like them, they should provide a few laughs :) Click on the images to be taken to the videos. Here is an illustration that Julia and I collaborated on for her brother's wedding card. It's always fun to do something handmade like this. I made another time lapse video of the work-in-progress. Some of it was cut out as I haven't decided if I want to buy the software to record my PC screen yet. I've started using Screencast-o-Matic and the free version only allows you to record in 15 minute clips, which it then renders automatically, forcing you to stop working until it is done. We were pressed for time, to say the least, lol, so we missed recording some action but I think you'll like this video as I talked over it, as opposed to playing music. Get ready to enjoy the sweet melodic tone of my voice as it puts you to sleep... Those that know my monotone voice should survive the five minutes without being lulled to sleep ;) I did TRY to add some inflection... not sure if it came across though! Congrats to the Two Winners of my First Print Giveaway, Dan S. and Tyson G.!!!Thanks for entering the contest and following my art!!! It's nice to give back to people who have showed support along the way. Dan reminded me that I did a good amount of work on the Earth, Moon, Space print at Foxwoods, my old workplace. I was commuting two-plus hours everyday to college, in class 6 hours everyday Monday thru Friday, and working 30-plus hours a week at the casino.
I don't miss that! All of my classmates were worried to leave school and I couldn't wait to get it over with, lol! It felt like I was in a fantasy world when I was there... I'm glad to be back in the real world now, despite the growing pains I felt the first year and a half out of school. After Dan jogged my memory, I flashbacked to myself standing at the podium scratching lines into a metal plate in between parking cars at the casino. Then I would bring it back to school in the morning, give it a bath in acid and do it all over again that night! Thanks for the reminder Dan! :) All that hard work is starting to pay off. Tyson, thank you for your encouragement and I hope to see some of your drawings soon! There's less than 24 hours to go before I raffle off two prints to a couple lucky followers! If you still haven't entered, click here, enter your email address or Facebook login in the widget and you will be prompted to select an Instagram entry or Email entry. Good luck everyone!
I had a great opportunity to do a commission recently for an officer in the Navy. Being a Navy brat myself, I was pretty excited to do this! I enlisted my Dad for some expert advice on submarine design. Thank you Dad! Take a look at the speed drawing video I made, it's my first one so be kind ;)
I didn't want to move my drawing to shake off the excess charcoal dust that accumulates. It took me hours and days to figure-out/perfect my studio set-up so as I could film from the top-down with decent lighting. That's what necessitated me using a vacuum. I'll just say here that I sucked up the drawing on more than one occasion. Ehh, what are you gonna do? I sure the hell wasn't going to do it a different way, I was already committed!
So here is a look into my (digital) sketchbook. I had fun doing this baby hippo painting in the ArtRage program. I love ArtRage for quick sketches. It's easy to flesh out different styles. This is a spaceship taking off. That's about it. This actually started as a landscape photograph I snapped. I painted over it in ArtRage, changing it to a more other-worldly setting, but still relatable to what we as humans know. The train is "Mars Express" and maybe in a hundred years or so... lol, Mars will be a habitable place like this! With all the gun violence in America I wanted to make something quick that didn't take a side. I took about 30 photos of the inside of my pocket with my cell phone. How could I possibly let those beauts go to waste? So I used one of those photos as the background of this sketch. (The pants were not purple, by the way, all though I do own purple pants.) I wanted to do something to show my support for the Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality. I'm glad to see equal rights for all! If you've ever printed out a test/calibration/alignment sheet on your printer, you may recognize the pattern/colors here. I drew the people in ink on the paper then scanned it into the printer and fixed it up in Photoshop. On a side note, I have been working on editing a timelapse video of a recent commission. I have no idea what I'm doing. Look for that in the next week or two.
For my latest commission I decided to get a little fancy. I got inspired by a filmmaker named Casey Neistat (he actually went to the same high school as me). Check out his YouTube channel here. Here are two videos that you definitely should check out, Make It Count and Bike Lanes by Casey Neistat. He has a lot of gratuitous time-lapses of NYC that are addicting to watch. (I say gratuitous because they are almost cliched at this point... how many times can you see the Empire State and Chrysler buildings at sunset, etc., etc.) Yet I can't look away! MUST SEE PRETTY COLORS AND TALL BUILDINGS NOW... I wanted to make a time-lapse with the equipment I had already and record me drawing this commission from start to finish. My materials: a Nikon D3100 DSLR camera, a couple of work lights, a package of wooden shims and 4 clamps. (All of them became apart of the project at different times, I certainly didn't look at them all and I say "Hmmm. I can make an overhead rig out of this") Here is how it started, the camera is hanging perilously above the desk from a tripod on the right and a work light on the left. I bought a small grippy tripod (advertised for trees and such) from Staples and that is how it is attached to the light. I quickly realized that unless I wanted a broken camera I needed to fix this setup. I organized a lot tools and studio supplies after watching a video about Casey's studio, but couldn't find a place for my tapes (Black Duct, Blue Painter's, White Artist's) so I use them as a pen holder on my desk! (Work's fine until I need the bottom tape) ALRIGHT!!!! NOW WE'RE TALKING!! I have some scrap illustration board propping up the front of the camera, a shim holding up the right of it, and four clamps holding it all in place. Also, notice the tracing paper taped on the two lights to diffuse them and the sheets of foam core to the left and rear that help bounce the light (relatively) evenly across the drawing. Not the prettiest looking but it worked more or less! Next time I hope to have figured out how to use the movie editing software on my computer and see if all the gigabytes of video I have will actually make a movie to show you... fingers-crossed.
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Landon R. WilsonWelcome to my blog. Archives
September 2019
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