zach's old animations and new visual art, updated every 25 to 60 days

thanks budo!

i'm almost done with this one!

https://i.imgur.com/NOiemT9.jpeg

it's painted over the top of this one, from a couple years ago

https://i.imgur.com/ynOtbMf.png

awesome!

Some real bangers here I hadn't seen yet. Thank you for the updates!

BTW, worth saying that this thread is an incredible (INCREDIBLE!) body of work. Took a scroll to the start and wowie-zowie you've got a collection here!

thank you H.P.! a scroll down memory lane is an arduous task in this thread, although photobucket/tinypic getting bought out and then taking all the images down probably helps a little. i believe the first image in this thread (and my first gif) was tom cruise eating shit on a loop! hopefully i saved that one somewhere, it was cutting edge gfx ;)

i think i finally finished the big one, so i'm getting ready to try to take some photos and document before it goes...above my bed i guess. a 70"x40" is a tough sell anywhere, lol, even my own apartment.

speaking of, sorry for a good news post but it's been a months-long process but i finally got my new studio space built up and ready to go at my new place! it's a very small room, but it has a window, a fan, nice light in the afternoons and evenings, close access to a sink, and a nice big mirror that's hung up at an angle to make it useful for figure references. also got a part-time job that's set up to just barely pay my living expenses and maximize the time i get to spend doing what i want to do (art and music).

i am out of paper towels, which means i'm done with this fucking painting *cheers*

https://i.imgur.com/xBlsCsJ.jpeg

i assume the paper towels were for wiping the sweat off your brow

looks great, kinda spooky

thank you!

paper towels are my cheap and lazy ass system to semi-clean brushes, really just re-using the same 3 or 4 brushes and palette knives for pretty much everything, so i'm always wiping them clean and dabbing excess paint left and right

Love your color.

appreciate it! so of course this has no color, yet:

https://i.imgur.com/9n4EOVM.jpeg

i'm probably going to add some color to it this afternoon, but it's just charcoal on a piece of drawing paper so i'm not sure it can withstand much more than oil pastels. i might add just a splash of color somewhere and then use fixative to keep the charcoal where it is now. i like how gritty and messy it is right now!

https://i.imgur.com/ZlfHUjC.jpeg

oh yes I love that as it is

welp, i went ahead and added a bunch of color! i accidentally used a patch of oil pastels (instead of chalk) which changed everything. i've been using a little kit of oil pastels i got a year ago, trying to use every single little piece all the way down to the nubb before moving on

https://i.imgur.com/S5wjb8y.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/5BmNTlP.jpeg

this is the same as the last image, but i used photoshop to sketch out what i want to do next (make the bowl on top a rice bowl; add a yellow shape at the bottom)

https://i.imgur.com/mUhEamW.jpeg

once i get those those down i want to revisit some of the flatter textures and give them this kind of smooth tectonic treatment, which unfortunately i can only figure out how to do with massive amounts of paint

https://i.imgur.com/z4RsTGh.jpeg

ok not "massive amounts" of paint, but more than i can afford. oil paint is expensive. however, one plus side is that i'm finding a very economical and practical reason to use the "only use primary colors + white" approach to mixing a palette, which i think is a fun way to go about things

stuff in progress and a couple quick pastel sketches from last night

https://i.imgur.com/OPJNhJy.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/S8xSxqq.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/HHXzDYr.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/pyHaKhj.jpeg

almost there!

https://i.imgur.com/QiYXGVa.jpeg

ok, i am now just dumping paint everywhere but who wouldn't like some impasto

https://i.imgur.com/mSJubzL.jpeg

as i was thinking "damn this is using up all this expensive-ass paint, again, fuck", i saw a post on facebook from my younger cousin saying that he thought that any painting that sold for over $500 was part of a laundering scheme. my family is a big supporter of the arts

large images alert

https://i.imgur.com/QEhj9ix.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/xSmkIlo.jpeg

i especially enjoyed working on the lemon, i guess just because i like the colors in a lemon a lot

https://i.imgur.com/DOdgII8.gif

.mp4 version of ^

https://imgur.com/ZNLOZBf

i work well with deadlines (or...it makes me get the work done quickly and usually effectively) so i'm happy to have only 8 days to finish these two.

https://i.imgur.com/pQCiRcA.jpeg

as always, i have been failing to submit my paintings anywhere, for anything, and so one of my goals is to at least do the low hanging fruit shit and submit to local juried exhibitions. the next one is due in 8 days and includes up to 5 paintings, and hopefully these will be #4 and #5. if nothing else, i still feel like i'm improving because i tend to be most excited about my most recent paintings. my cleanliness has been shot to hell (i have paint all over myself, my computer, the bathroom, the floors. last night i had a burnt umber disaster which was exacerbated by the color of the cheapass floor being burnt umber, also. it was like playing paintball in the dark without nightvision) and i've almost completely stopped using brushes (just relying on the same plastic palette knife for almost everything, which i'd like to change)

i hope that i get to show the one on the left irl someday because i think it is better appreciated in person. it has this weird illusion thing going on that's heightened if you look at it from a certain perspective - specifically, about 2 feet away, with the eye level in the middle of the painting, at about where the wrists are. from that position, you can tilt your head downward and see the feet and lamps and floor as if you were looking down at them from above in the painting. the same with tilting the viewer's head upward - i'm trying to make it so the head and future plant life will look like it's up there in the sky, looking down at you. it's kind of like a fisheye perspective, i suppose, but i'm not sure it'll come through.

one thing that sucks about these anonymous juried exhibitions is that they don't look at the paintings irl, they just look at images. (i understand why they do that, and yeah, i don't really want to go to the effort of hauling my awkward-ass sized paintings to some building and dealing with all that shit only to learn that once again, i was not accepted but thank you for the $35 fee and there's another opportunity next month, it costs $35 though, and haul all the paintings back home). for each of the five paintings, i'm allowed to submit one image showing the whole canvas, and one detail. i guess that's better than nothing, but the thing i'm most interested in while i'm working is in the close-up texture, impasto, volume/depth stuff that you have to see in person, and i'm not sure that ever really comes across in images

finally finished!

https://i.imgur.com/5DAwsty.jpeg

my favorite details are here

https://i.imgur.com/Y0EJxSK.jpeg

the other evening i did what i should do way more often and took a blanket and some fruit and drawing pads out to the park to watch the sunset. these were very quick, with oil pastels, and they don't really resemble what i was looking at, but i like them anyway!

https://i.imgur.com/W7BA3zl.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/Gvf1yYY.jpeg

not sure anyone near my time zone checks this thread but i'm streaming for the next few hours!

https://www.twitch.tv/zach_tbd

trying to start a new era of "quiet" / asmr streaming, but with some talking too

https://i.imgur.com/tiTRvtt.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/W0B0fDE.jpeg

finished this one today

https://i.imgur.com/UpcBooB.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/uW5wkhf.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/9ABlR3s.jpeg

Is the figure on the left giving us the bird?

Love it btw

thank you, appreciate you looking! of course, as soon as i finished documenting it, i realized the window/legs needed to be shifted a bit, so i just made a little edit

https://i.imgur.com/f1xwt5I.jpeg

i might try to use this one (made with oil pastels) as a study for an oil painting, which is a combo i've never really tried before. i imagine it might be a little frustrating (getting the right colors with oil pastels is nice and easy because they come in sets that already complement each other, whereas with oil i try to just use primary colors + white to create colors) but also a challenging exercise, probably a good one to try!

Is the figure on the left giving us the bird?

oops, forgot to say, yes. it is a crude figure on multiple levels

        _____
        |_ _|
   n    (O O)    n
   H   _|\_/|_   H
  nHnn/ \___/ \nnHn
 <V VV /     \ VV V>
  \__\/|     |\/__/

https://i.imgur.com/cBvlnKI.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/jwUr3ba.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/2WEO7RO.jpeg

these are great!

thanks so much! i had fun cutting them up and putting it all (well most of it) back together. i finished it up this morning:

https://i.imgur.com/0T2R4CM.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/WcArAZb.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/5GJIKGG.jpeg

great vibe

haha, thank you! i made the mistake of starting that last one on an extremely thin (35 lb grade) sheet of newspaper of print, so it will probably disintegrate soon

will be back a lot more around late january but i wanted to share this cool exhibition/fundraiser since all proceeds are going to Palestine Children’s Relief Fund:

https://www.gcadd.org/pcrf2

i submitted a painting, and there are also lots of other local stl artists who donated art! please check it out. in general trying to sell sucks horribly but in this case you could help contribute toward really important.

it's this 18"x24" oil painting from july 2023. i'm just going to repost the instagram square image because tbh wtf cares these days

https://i.imgur.com/RjJ3pHb.jpeg

love that bridge painting

yes its a good bridge

https://i.imgur.com/LoNxYsj.jpeg

matt and latham, thank you! i was on a bit of a half-assed ilx hiatus for a while, and then i had a meltdown a few weeks ago and decided to stop painting, gave away everything for free (which started from a pouty egocentric place and ended up feeling really good and reminded me of how much support i really have in so many ways), decided i would just be taking a quick hiatus from painting and then just started painting again a few days ago. what can i say? i think the genocide and the election and ~everything~ adds up to so much grief and emotional weirdness, the best we (or at least i) can do is to just try to keep going and remind ourselves of what we are apparently living for, reasons to keep living, etc. it seems hopeless sometimes but art speaks a language that is outside of political control and that's why it's important to always keep that flame burning hot

this one was from a few weeks ago, weirdly was the last thing i made before the meltdown lol

https://i.imgur.com/iAlAlM5.jpeg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KubRqi0BIE4