Copper Lion Revisited | Paper 24

("You are the best human I know. Thanks for making me want to be the best human I can be.")

Certainly that must be worth much.
Acrylic and mixed media on wood, 9"x5 1/2".

Shameful to think that if my wallet had gone missing, so may have this little piece of paper. So I made it part of this piece. Shameful to know that it's doubtful I can use it as my resume.

Wood Signs for Woodland Nephews

One of my very favorite friends is going to be Aunt Mel for the second time (this May), and I did a carve+stain+sand on this tree truck cross-section for her to take all the way back to her nephew's nursery, in Sandpoint, ID. 

Copper Lion

Acrylic, metallics, ink, plastics on wood. 9" x 5 1/2"

Personified: to live as though we expect the lion to live, unaffected by much, could be a great gift. 

Painting Repair 2

Oil on canvas with a 5" tear. Look closely in this rip, it's my cat. This repair was more self-explanitory that the last, the most important part being the painting replication. I patched the back with a piece  of size-appropriate canvas using Nova Gel, sanded the duct tape off the front (note: not a painting I own, or made) and primed the new patched "strip" area. Mixed new paint colors to match. 

New Index

I was curious to see if I would work better (+faster) with a hands-on version of "every piece of artwork I've ever made" in tiny piece of paper form. It helps and I love it. It's like an odd little game every time I comb the images selecting which work samples to send off. 

Just for the sake of place holders I used things that were unfinished (pear below) but only one shot per mural. New categories coming soon on scbaker.com.

Queen Mother Mary

18"x24" oil on canvas. Portrait of my mom and her cat. I started painting this pink years ago, and realized it was silly not to finish it, especially since I just used it as a birthday gift. 

Detail

Regal Roosts

This is the small [incredible] woodshop I worked with for over a year.  Still taking your custom orders, Regal Roosts is undergoing a slow but steady transition to Arizona. Here is their sparkling new website (via Seven Set Studios).  Specializing in handbuilt, Victorian style, meticulously hand-painted, beautifully distressed, seriously fine crafted birdhouses with ornate, aged copper roofs. These pieces last for years, indoors AND outdoors, (so as to be used properly by birds). Gorgeous garden additions, we also produced extraneous furniture pieces and garden items by request. There's even a shop dog.
Read about the Hursts in the Baltimore Sun, like their fb page, pass this info on to collectors, and remember what spectacular gifts these gems make.

We spent over a year fulfilling high volume orders of several styles for the Frontgate company; find only limited lines through Frontgate right now, but place an order directly through the Hursts, at regalroosts.com for endless color and style possibilities.

Cottage Collection (hanging) and the Diamond Lady series, front

Copper, detail

Hand-painted game table

Series of bottoms, and my all time favorite bottom

Everyone's favorite watermelon house

Faux rust

The Palermo, one of the first Frontgate orders

Custom painted and refinished antique garden cart

Hand-painted chest, turned urn

Doolittle

Wolf Boots and Gel Transfers

Before I got rid of a very beat up pair of old "casual" boots, I decided white wolf boots would be a much better fate. Here is a very brief description involving a gel transfer method. First I had to prime and paint the boots white. Cheap white acrylics and glazing liquid to stretch and smooth (avoiding water) gave the boots a thick and heavy sheen (I did about four coats). Transferring images can give you amazing results. This is my least favorite method, but I didn't have much of a choice. Using xylene or another [dangerous] transfer chemical usually gives a better, clearer, and hassle free result (AND YOU CAN SIMPLY WEAR A MASK AND GLOVES). Since the boot surface had become non-porous and very un-absorbant, ink from the image slid off using xylene, so it was not worth the battle. 

When I had toner based images prepared, I coated both the application area and the surface of the paper with Golden's regular gel and slapped them all over the boots, (flat with no air pockets) and allowed to dry for several hours. If this is for a paper on paper project, or anything 2d, it is an easy and beneficial method. Some people might even use a brayer to flatten. 

This is the part that is BS: Spend the next several months dampening the back of the paper and gently massaging off the fibers from the image -now simply just the toner gelled to the surface of the boot. You will have to do this in agonizing rounds of drying and re-dampening to see where the fibers that you still need to remove are located. When the images re-appeared to my liking, I clear-coated the boots. Note: this doesn't actually take literal months unless you take frequent hiatuses.

Then I wore the brand new WhiteWolfBoots to my sister's house, and she wanted a pair so badly I agreed to make them for her. Repeat process. 

Wolf boot love.

I'm a Good Dog

(This took place November 9th at Atomic Books in Baltimore.)  Ken Foster author of I'm A Good Dog, was in town at the book store -which is much more than a book store- for a signing, a speaking session, and an all around event complete with illustration show.  See my piece below. Proceeds went towards B-More Dogs, a Pit Bull advocacy group in town. Also found out about Erin Fitzpatrick, who's pet portrait ability was being auctioned off that night, fitzbomb.com for her more relevant work. I also met Ruby the therapy dog! Not being raised around dogs of any sort, I can finally get on well with them by now.. but I wanted to crawl into this specific dog's face-folds and sleep in a cradle of love.

Medicinals. More cutesy than not.. 12"x12" acrylic and ink on mat board. This is certainly a memory from my real life, only sub cats. 

 Put together by Posi-Party

Refinished Guitars: Part 2

Refinished gunpowder-ed and pink bass guitar. Non-functional but visually indulgent. A battle of the modern sea vs. prehistoric land and air. Personalized for none other than Rohry Flood, the bass playing Canadian wannabe. Complete with commemorative 30 year old Canadian penny, hematite, and a dangerous bullet! Varnished, shiny, and secure for life. (Guitars: part one, is still a collection of photos in limbo and doesn't exist.)

Ink Drops

A few new [little] ink pieces in the works. Inks featured here with Miss EggNoggies. Perhaps the greatest cat who ever did live. Blue eye... green eye.

Wolves in real life

How incredible was this on rt. 2? Never seen one before, maybe I'll never see one again. 

Doctors, Pandas, Women

I don't think I've had this much of a Savannah/SCAD inspired weekend since living back in Maryland. Three consecutive days off (boom), I painted until 1:30 a.m. in an empty building all alone, had to be up early for a film/lecture at a film festival, I purchased 4 new notebooks (very excited to fill them up with lists, notes and art-notes), and thought of a new tattoo (hopefully won't get this one). Then there was being too busy to eat, calling doctors I don't know (and who don't know me, double plus), setting up a new website (for the lady I'm painting murals with) and managing to log into my old paypal account, only to find that the address on record was still W 38th street in Savannah, GA. How nostalgically full circle.

So here is one complete panda. Currently I'm working with "A Girl and A Brush", painting rooms in the new Chesapeake Bay Pediatrics, Stevensville, MD.

Not quite complete pandas:

New topic. Rowdy hearted women, bold art. The Guerilla Girls are in all of these types of documentaries, though. Not that there's anything wrong with that. (Love.) I'm really curious to see who and what will be discussed in 20 years when one of these films is made about today and tomorrow's art-minded women.

And, more pandas. This is from the mural we made off-site and installed in the children's oncology  room at Memorial Hospital, Savannah GA in 2008.

No stranger to pandies. They also eat for about 14 hours a day. Side note, one of the books I'm using is called Animal Life Cycles, every page has a detailed illustration of every animal mating, from hedgehogs to hyenas. It's actually all the same.