Urban escape Float Therapy hand painted sign

Friends of mine have this nifty little place on Edmonton Trail called Urban Escape.

I just finished fixing up their painted signage. Have you seen it while passing by? Have you tried a float yet?

The stencil on the textured wall left a lot of over spray as well as the cut out marks.

I wanted to crisp up the letters around the edges and get rid of the missing areas of the lettering while maintaining the lower wave like band.

Up a ladder, I block in the charcoal grey first, people on Edmonton trail keep commenting on my butt while up here, must be the angle.

Here is the one side all cleaned up. The address is 208 Edmonton trail and they are open.

Here is the other side of the building after I blocked in the charcoal lettering. The over spray makes it look real gritty which I why I was compelled to tidy it up.

And here it is completed. I love how the late afternoon sun cast the shadows.

Visit uescape.ca to try a float.

We are the Champions

my friends.....

 I had to make myself wait until after the Versus show to share the piece on this blog. I started with a little bit a month ago but then stopped just to be fair. Hopefully you got out to the exhibit if you could. There were over 40 artists involved in the project and some amazing collaborations. The Gentlemen Destroyers made some cool walls in the front space to hang all the work and there was a good turn out while I was there.

A quick review. I ended up cutting out two different stencils back in may of the champ Batista, also a means to sign my piece since we share the same last name.

I had drawn out my anatomical heart which eventually became completely covered by my ballistic gel inspired victim figure. I started in pencil and painted in with acrylic on the re-stretched canvas.

Here is an early process shot after Ray got his Rich stencil cut and applied to the surface.

 So jumping ahead, I added the beam out of the characters mouth as an integration challenge to bring the two sides together. I have eyeballs popping out of the skull, they still need irises at this point. The blood is red but still too transparent. I splatter painted in the Batista Stencil and rubbed iridescent silver into the negative space then gave it a light sand.

I allowed a variety of browns to drip down the canvas to create more layers and depth. I cut a second negative stencil of Batista and splatter painted blues over the silver. I applied a thick pink to cover the blood and I was going to stain it red afterward but liked the interplay of pinks and blue so much I left it.  I painted in the irises in the eyes and blocked in the lower jaw.

A little further along and now there is a bit more back and forth between my collaborative partner. He added the laser rays to the piece. I decided to add a background of stars and rework the depth and shading on the skeletal elements. I created some star stencils and some tear drop stencils. I sprayed in some reflective gold spray paint and worked out some finer details.

Here you can get an idea of the detail and layering that went into the piece, this is after it is frames and varnished.

This is an angled shot taken the day Derek picked up the piece to bring to the gallery. You can see the frame job and the interplay of light on the reflective surface. ray stayed up for 2 nights working on a party binge to get the piece together with BONUS framing = sweet surprise to wake up to!

Here is the final piece to be delivered. I hand wrote the pieces title with my favorite gold paint pen. we gave it a healthy coating of outdoor vehicle clear coat. The piece has a nifty little write up explaining our process making it. Hopefully you get a chance to see our handy work in person =;)

Flame shields

It was nice and sunny. I got up early and got outside and in the sun to get to work cutting my flame shields for my upcoming series.

I used a vellum product that was new to me called OPALUX. I bought a 19X 24", 110lb translucent sheet. I needed something that could be easily wiped clean if need be so I selected a type of velum. I also needed something that was stiff enough to stand up on its own to act as a stencil or masking object when airbrushing in my flames.

Above you can see the shapes I made and how they fit together. This material is quite nice to draw on and cut fairly well.  However, I would prefer a thicker material that holds it shape better. I also found the opalux to be too brittle, it chips and cracks too easily, making little imperfections in some of the curves. I do not recommend opalux for this purpose, in future will NOT used for creating stencils or shields. But that is how you figure things out, you try them and see if they work. I still think watercolor paper is much better suited for the task.

I taped the shields back together with some thick masking tape. This worked great to keep them together but also added rigidity to my shields. I  cut out some of the little detailed flame elements. When not in use they will be taped over, so now I have three shields that can be separated into six to make a wide variety of shapes for when I paint my flame backgrounds.

And I did it all in the sun on my stoop while having breakfast in the sunlight, a great way to start some art today ;)

Here are some examples form google of how the finished work is supposed to look!

Then out came the trusty watercolour paper. I found a site online that offered a variety of other examples of templates for more variety of flame shield.  Get them here at : www.chuckbauman.com 

With all these I'll have a huge variety of things I can do, I am so excited to get started. Alas, I have to wait for about two weeks as I am taking a two week, full-time traditional portraits in oils course. In the evenings I have martial arts and salsa class and on the week-end I am doing an animation lock down and lilac fest. Busy bunny =B

In the cut!

Got my biz cards and cut my "Batista" stencil tonight.

Here it is after 3 blades went dull slicing out the thick watercolor rag paper. I think it took about 2.5 hrs. It needs to be tested and possible tweaked after I see how it turns out.

Here are my 18pt. recycled Kraft business cards from Jukeboxprint.com. I am stoked they turned out so good. I cant wait to start handing them out, 495 more to go ;)

On my way back to my truck after picking up my business cards I saw this billboard. At first I was pissed and was promising I would never drink Molson, but then I looked at the cool black and gold label and the squiggly mounted art campaign and felt that the ad was beginning to work, maybe.

One more thing:

 I may have made an expensive mistake. I entered an online art competition to discover a new artist, there was a $50 fee but I got so caught up in the dream that I went thru with it. So now I need to enlist all the help I can get. I have 22 days to get people to do one simple thing, its all online you don't have to go anywhere or do anything or spend money. All you have to do is go to the page (Click on the link here!) and vote for my portfolio by clicking on the right hand button with the star titled "Collect Me". Pass it on, help me out if you can.

Pretty please with sugar on top!

Versus show piece, the process proceeds

Finally after grabbing some supplies, rayzor is ready to get going on his part of the piece.

A stencil of our good friend RicHard. The original photo was from a post card he gave me. It was scanned and I brought it into photoshop, did some adjustments and printed it out on a number of sheets to be a suitable size to create the stencil. Rayzor cut the vellum stencil by hand with a tiny swivel knife.

It looks pretty good. He gets his airbrush out and adheres the stencil to the canvas. Here is it applied to the canvas. There is a lot that can be done creatively with the hair. I suggested he paint dancing flames to make it really dynamic. We lined up the mouth to continue diagonally into what will be the weapon jutting from his cavernous mouth.

I picked up a large piece of watercolor paper to create my stencil. I will be using this stencil for other projects but it may come into play here. It's of the wrestler BATISTA - No relation.  Rayzor's swivel knife and other exacto blade are no good for my needs. I will have to pick up new blades for mine and get working on it tomorrow. This printout was made using the same technique and has been taped down ready to go.

BATISTA = NO RELATION!