Hey, let me drunkenly animate your photos in about 25 to 60 days!

i've been trying to learn how to paint. i am not very good at drawing and have a shaky hand and no idea how to mix colors together. i love it. my favorite thing about life, i think, is the very first stage of learning new things, when every time you come back you learn something fundamental, or you mess up in a spectacular but educational way. i used to like the beginning of this thread, back past 2010 now, yonder, an age from which every single digital image link on earth has now broken, because among the first few gifs were a few pixels of flat brown poop flying into tom cruise's chomping mouth. it was kind of south park level of animation, but i remember being exhilarated at what i had learned, that i had pulled it off so that the mouth would just keep on chompin' on that shit! forever! learning to paint has been fun in a similar way so far, sorta.

i'm using a beginners set of acrylics, and so far i've been using a little 9"x12" drawing pad thing. they curl up on the edges, and i had a complete debacle with them with the one i just finished. i think i will upgrade to a real canvas soon.

i'm up to four paintings now, although i think i've now abandoned the 3rd one. the first one is pretty bad, but if you got through that paragraph above then you know what i mean when i say it's my tom cruise eating shit painting, and i remember feeling really happy and positive about it when i finished it. the second, third, and fourth all went through a similar process: they started with a decent underpainting, then looked ok for a minute as i added on, and then i kept going way too long and made them worse (or ruined them completely). in chronological order with wiseass comments insults:

https://i.imgur.com/0rNoYFP.jpg
0amp
hey, i know what will be a good subject for a first attempt at acrylics - a really intricate pattern from the front of an amp! also, for the first and not the last time, i ruined a decent background at the last moment by tossing brown paint on it look like a shit-spattered toilet, for no reason.

https://i.imgur.com/2ImmCVz.jpg
1ref
we moved recently to an apartment with better lighting, and we've been using all of our disposable income (negative $45 a week) on plants. this one is a euphorbia, which is kind of like saying "this one is a plant". not very descriptive. some experts would say it has "cactus-like features"

https://i.imgur.com/FZ9U2QM.jpg
1underpainting
this is the first time i made an underpainting and then sketched an outline on top of that. on the amp one, i sketched something out in pencil and then did the underpainting, which completely covered up the sketch. learning from the past for the first time in several months, this time around i did the underpainting and THEN sketched something out. hey man, gotta put your socks on before your pants, or whatever.

https://i.imgur.com/wLu4Ig0.jpg
1shouldhavestoppedhere
i like the colors on this one, despite them not at all resembling the colors i was intending to make on my palette. i remain catastrophically inept at mixing colors. anyway, i lucked out with some good accidental colors on this one. but then i was unhappy the little black dots near the wall corner so i kept going

https://i.imgur.com/BRGnDhC.jpg
1toodone
i feel like the black spot in the corner is the equivalent of the bad tattoo that gets converted into a solid filled geometric shape.

https://i.imgur.com/60LnnLm.jpg
3showerplants_ref
i thought i'd get experimental and i fucked everything up, a true story. the idea was to take two pictures of the plants on our shower wall, from two different angles, then overlay them. in the image above, the arrows connect the two different versions of each plant, one from each angle. without the arrows, it is really confusing to figure out which plants are which, and i thought that was really funny for some reason.

https://i.imgur.com/Rniki1S.jpg
3underpainting
everything started out fine. the colors, as usual, were completely off. i wanted a much lighter shade for the wall, but i was lazy and just went with what i had, hoping it would be lighter when it dried. nope! so at this point i tried to embrace the idea of a hellish version of the shower plants. you're in hell, ahahahaha! and there are plants in the shower, which is red! aaaahahaaaaaaaa

https://i.imgur.com/PlELYer.jpg
3masking
first time i tried to use masking tape for its intended purpose. my thought was to make the cracks in the tiles by painting black shadows which were exactly straight/flat on one side, and then doing overlaying white highlights with a straight edge.

https://i.imgur.com/YI3MPSW.jpg
3inprogress
now i look back at this and think it wasn't awful, but at the time i felt i had to fix it.

https://i.imgur.com/gLXsIlh.jpg
3abandoned
again, i was struck by the urge to fling brown shit paint all over things?! at the time i remember that my intention was to make shadows, or at least lighter and darker areas. but i have now learned that uh, you don't do that by taking brown shit paint and slapping it on there willy nilly. i've never used watercolors (at least not since little kid times), but i think that it might be more possible to do "overlay" shadows with them. but acrylics? no. after studying the color wheel a little bit later on, i realized that shadows are just, you know, different shades of other colors, rather than a partly transparent black overlay. that all sounds very college bong rip guy, i know, but i've been making shadows digitally for so long that i kind of forgot their basic relationship to the subject. i also sketched in some plants (from the ref above), and it's obvious i made the colors during a very different time, because the colors for the plant pots are completely different and have no relationship to the background. at this point i decided that i should never try, ever again

https://i.imgur.com/8I3MMs3.jpg
4ref
but then a few nights ago i looked at the doorway to our front room and thought it would make a good subject for a much simpler painting. obviously i way overdid it on the the shower plants thing. btw, that shower plants thing took many hours! holy shit i spent a lot of time on it! in contrast, drawing and painting this doorway was all done in a single night, a PR.

https://i.imgur.com/tmZBueb.jpg
4sketch

trying to keep it simple and also not worry about little mistakes in the sketch. also let's face it, showing off those orchids

https://i.imgur.com/QqcNYns.jpg
4doorway
this was a masking tape disaster but i decided to just roll with it. when i peeled some of the tape strips off, the paper came up as well. you can see it clearly on the left side of the doorway, but it happened elsewhere too. but i kind of like it! after 3 of these mini-disasters in a row, each ending with a "well....maybe?" i decided it was done

Congratulations both on the work you are doing and the obvious joy it is bringing you

thank you! i am afraid to try a human figure or face, so maybe i will attempt to never do it, once

you'll get there

Karl def just go to figure drawing and just Start

also thank u for dn

oh of course! i knew back then, when i was that guy, that there might be unexpected positive consequences in the future. but i never guessed that it would inspire a dn. feels worth it!

Looking great so far!

karl these are awesome

i like all your plants too

thank you! have you been painting too? if so we could move this convo over to Your art (picture thread) because i'd love to see what you and others are up to, and it would be weird to host that discussion on this thread

and thanks DJI! :)

Euphorbia trigona, I believe, and good work! I took a painting class at a local junior college and it was pretty fun.

i finally got my bandcamp together! i have worked out an exclusive deal with them to release my music! i told them "listen, i'm going to charge what i want, and i don't want to charge a thing - i'm talking free streaming, free download, i'm talking total free access!" and they backed down immediately, agreeing to all of my demands.

i am trying to use coronavirus as a delimiter. in the same way that the perusing the recent copy of bookforum feels outside of time, because none of the articles or commentary mentions coronavirus, i have some songs from the past few years that i'd like to stop working on. i started working on them so long ago it seems insane, and never felt that they were "done". so now they're done! fuck it! here's one:

https://zs25zs.bandcamp.com/track/twelve-tone-era

i haven't told anyone about this outside of my ilx family so if you actually like it please let me know so i can build up the courage to do the full instagram friends and family post. but otherwise i'll just also post some new animations so the conversation can just sort of drift toward that without too much weirdness. but also with _some_ weirdness, i suppose.

jfc coronavirus

guess i can share some painting "progress" (unfortunately another case where i kept going and made it worse with each new stroke)

i decided to take silby's advice and just do a figure drawing, fuck it. but i figured i'd start out with a really tiny one, low stakes. but still near the middle. i like how the figure turned out, as well as the tree line on the left. i really fucking hate what i did to the sky. i'm noticing that i like my simple lines better than the more complicated sections, and can't tell if that's just because i'm better at them or that i'm so bad at the detail work. time will tell! "we'll see what happens"

https://i.imgur.com/k9eWMtD.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/6eWgjk4.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/HXOAjku.jpg

!

looking good

i think for the next one i'm going to consolidate my gains and focus on ONLY SUNSET TREE LINES.

thank you hadrian!!

if anyone wants that last painting just let me know and i'll mail it to you. my only demand is that you "buy" my new hit single for free. i used an earlier stage of the painting as the digital artwork for it, so it's a promotional bullshit thing. then i'll mail it to you! along with a $5 bill. i will also just give you $5. i just now decided to throw that in

Hey, Zach, that single is great! As a feelies fan, I think it compares favourably. Will listen repeatedly.

wow thanks! i love the feelies so much, so that means a lot :)

You are an inspiring dude, Karl.

:) that's very nice, thank you DJI. i definitely do not feeling inspiring right now - honestly i feel like i am just falling down the stairs, metaphorically. i feel like i'm trying to hard and just spinning my wheels, for so long. but my backup plan is to try to be transparent about the process, the development of small things that at least kind of worked, and the constant failures along the way, just because i like when other people share those things.

I like it when people share them, too, and I like the way you share. You’re a gem, ZS.

FREAK OUT!!

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

https://i.imgur.com/Sl8tmLC.gif

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

just isolating it so it's easy to scroll past for people who might barf

xpost

< hardcore

<3 hardcore

messing around with some iridescent gold acrylic paint. it's really weird. unless you gloop it on heavily, it's terribly thin and transparent. not in a good way. don't know wtf is going on with that one so far but it's saturday night

https://i.imgur.com/JFzVUuS.jpg

i had to delete earlier FREAK OUT! gif because it was the wrong version. here is the proper version:
.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.
https://i.imgur.com/mxuCti6.gif
.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

god dammit, that was STILL the wrong one. oh well. freak out over.

https://media.giphy.com/media/QBAkTtkFyoME3x0S4D/giphy.gif

hi Karl, I enjoyed the track a lot, liked the guitar sound

interesting to see your paintings evolve too. definitely inspiring to see yr things take shape, and to see someone fight against this horrible anxious block which I guess we're all feeling now. anyway, thanks, take care

thanks for listening! it is my first electric guitar and amp (ES-339 and Fender blues jr IV), so i don't have much to compare it to, but it seems to be good at handling bright Byrds-like tones.

i had my first total painting failure last night. 6 hours spent on it, and i completely ruined it at the end.

one thing that sucks about using analog media: no Undo feature

that’s the best part, actually

haha well yeah, it's true. i feel that way most of the time. but holy shit every once in a while i wish i could Undo. maybe just like one big Undo you can do, per week, so that you have to make it count

https://i.imgur.com/Pj2s77B.jpg

i've painted half of this! but if i repeat what i just painted, upside down, as a different layer, and adjust the opacity and saturation down, it'll look like this! so pretty much halfway there, rounding up to done

sorry, drunk. what i mean is that i'm going to try to take the current version

https://i.imgur.com/JFzVUuS.jpg

and paint a new layer over parts of it that look like above

and by "rounding up to done" i was trying to make a joke about being halfway done and obviously far away from finishing but rounding up to the next milestone ("done")

i have been recently informed that some of my jokes aren't landing and don't even make sense. things got a little dry over here, humorwise, on my part

i'm laying it all out here on the table

don't bother scooping up my corpse, coach, i gave it all up out there on the field

sometime, when the team is up against it -- and the breaks are beating the boys -- tell them to go out there with all they got and win just one for the Gipper

i was already giving 110% out there. but then my pay got docked 80% but my tasks remained the same, so now i'm giving, uh...let's see...138%

jeez, i was a little drunk last night

thought of you
https://zooooom.us/

"This is a real parody and a real screensaver"

And a real ripoff of conferencecall.biz!

i'm surprised conferencecall.biz hasn't gone viral again