Happy Year of the Snake!

~some of the sketches working through the design for this piece.

新年快樂

새해 복 많이 받으세요

chúc mừng năm mới

Happy Lunar New Year!

enigma alien • x.29

I ended 2012 and began 2013 working on the enigma aliens. Two of them are small oil paintings which are going to Gallery Nucleus as part of a show next month. I've only posted a couple very early progress photos of them over on Facebook, but I can share this enigma alien extract now. It grew from a small sketch that I drew when I was trying to decide what the second enigma would be. Not this one, it turns out, but I liked carrying it forward as one of my acrylic on watercolor paper extracts. I hope you do to!

acrylic on Arches 300 watercolor paper 8" x 10"

alien evolution

In 1974 (or there about) I did this drawing of a guy who I named "Neptonian". A lot of the inspiration for this character came from the Outer Space Men toy, Astro-Nautilus (with a bit of Star Trek the Animated series thrown in). I still remember drawing this and how much fun it was to do.

Seventeen years later I was still painting aliens. This one was done as a book cover for the James White novel the "Genocidal Healer" in 1991.

Astronomer • alien menagerie #4, was done eighteen years after "Genocidal Healer" (thirty-five years since the "Neptonian"). I'm still painting aliens.

*it's still a really enjoyable thing to be doing 

2012.12.x28

acrylic on Arches 300 watercolor paper 8" x 10"

I'm pretty confident most of us are left with the feeling that we're trying to do too much. For myself, just about everyday starts with a certain optimism about how much can be accomplished, and ends somewhere short of that mark. Writing for this blog has been a regular victim of those shortages of time.

X.28 was finished about a month ago. I'd planned on posting it with an eye to the end of autumn, around the Thanksgiving holiday. The shape of x.28 reminded me of the gourds that are used as decoration about that time of year. I rather liked that idea, and I have a real fondness for fruits and vegetables with faces. 

Of course I never wrote that blog entry, and I couldn't quite figure out how to introduce x.28 to the world, until I realized it would be a good end-of-year post. So here's an alien that went ignored in the rush to move forward with new work and keep up with all the other things that life asks of us. I missed making a Holiday alien this year, but I've been working on some pieces for a group show early next year, and look forward to sharing those. So onward into 2013. I'm hoping to populate it with another round of groovy outer space aliens!

Now Available!

The 1st assortment of Alien Menagerie Collector Cards debuted at IlluXcon V. They can be ordered from my online store for $4.50 a pack (that includes the shipping).  Originals can also be purchased here. 

Coming Soon!

While my blog here has been quiet, I've been busy working on several different projects and I'm exited to announce one of those today with this promo video. 

The 1st 5 card set will debut at Illuxcon 2012 in just a few days, November 8-11th. Online sales will follow shortly thereafter.

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x.27

I'm not entirely sure if this is a really big alien, or if that's a really tiny planet.

acrylic on Arches 300 watercolor paper 8" x 10"