My other blog

In case you don't know, I've started another blog to post my paintings. You can find it here.

UK Paintings, pt.10

I'm going to try and finish up these painting posts, so I can get on with some other stuff. I have three trips during my recent vacation time that I would still like to post some pictures of. Then, more posts are sure to follow as I go back to...wait for it........Korea. Keep reading and I'll keep writing.

This painting is from a wedding I attended in Peterborough, England. The groom is the son of a friend whom I met in Korea. The bride, pictured is attempting to remove the part of her dress which got caught in a chair while walking down the isle. It made for a great photograph, and a decent painting:

I love how all of the texture turned out in this, but her face came out way too dark. I kept trying to put some yellow color on her face, which caused it to turn out green. Oops.

UK Paintings, pt.9

This is my favorite painting from the set. This painting is of my girlfriend, Summer. She invited me to go on the trip to the UK, so she's the reason I went. Here she is blowing a dandelion seeds into the summer breeze as we walk along the Thames River in London. This painting just came out so well and I really love it.

UK Paintings, pt.8

This was cool. Located in Wales near the city of Swansea is a village called Rhossili. It's a picturesque place, recently featured in the drama Torchwood. My favorite part was the island of Worm's Head. It's actually only an island for 18 to 20 hours a day. The other few hours, it's a peninsula because the tide lowers and allows daring visitors to brave the rocky passage out to the island. I recommend it.

UK Paintings, pt.7

This one is a fairly famous site in England, Stonehenge. I think that the grayish rocks reflect the grayish sky nicely, though I changed the rocks to liven up the color.

UK Paintings, pt.6

So this paintings isn't my favorite because the colors didn't work out, but it's here. It's a cow. A cow from Wales.

UK Paintings, pt.5

It was another rainy day in London, probably the 400th of that year. I think it counts twice if it's rainy then sunny then rainy again. The guards at Buckingham Palace still had to guard it, though there was no changing of the guard ceremony that day due to the wet weather.

UK Paintings, pt.3

Back with another painting from the UK trip. This is a picture of Marlene, looking upon the area she grew up from a hill in Rhossili, Wales:

UK Paintings, pt.2

I wanted to put this one up because it turned out really well. This picture was taken from the front row of a double-deck bus on the way to London Bridge.

UK Paintings, pt.1

It's been a while to post on this blog, I know. I want to post something from my recent trip to the U.K., but I have so many pictures. Since there are too many pictures, I'm just going to post 12 small postcard paintings that I made from pictures taken on the trip.

I'm going to start with one of my favorites. It's a painting of the Scott Monument. It's very gothic:

The monument was always lurking in the skyline of Edinburgh. I didn't believe that people could climb to the top because it didn't look like there was any entrance to it, but there was. A very cool monument.

I Got PAID

I thought this would be exciting news for my readers, that I got paid for something other than teaching. Well, it's not a lot of money, but I got paid a comission for a painting of some dogs for my friend Jackie. I'll just get on with the painting:

I just had to paint her three little dogs. The only catch for me is that they are so ugly...but in kind of a cute way I guess. Oh well, I only had to stare at this picture for about 10 hours:

One noteable change is that I did not paint the penis of the dog on the left. I thought that was the classy thing to do. I also changed the background to a more soothing blue color, because I really hated the yellow. I think it turned out well, and Jackie says that her mom may comission me to do a large family portrait for them. We'll see how that goes...

I'm Still Painting

I want to take a break from the vacation posts and put a few of my paintings on here. I have completed these recently, within the past few months. Actually I'm going to have to do another post with lanterns I have painted recently because there's about a half a dozen of those as well.

Here is 'Sunrise, Sunset':

'Yellow Elephant':

'Bar Snacks':
This last one is an orange monochromatic painting I made after a picture taken of my friend Joe and I while pretending to smoke some bar snacks in a bar in Seoul. Anyway, keep reading and I'll post about my families trip to Korea soon.

A Self Portrait

So I'm guessing some readers are expecting a post about my birthday...and it's coming. I'm just waiting for a few more pictures from that night to come in. It will be soon, don't worry.

To hold you over until that post comes, I have a painting to post that was recently finished. It's a self portrait, obviously, well hopefully it's obvious. It's me made of about a thousand tiny retangles. Then I used only six colors to make up my face and hair. It think it turned out well!

Oops

So things have been slow around this blog. I'll go ahead and admit that it's got a lot to do with the fact that the cord that connects my camera to my computer is missing, and I can't upload photos right now.

To satiate readers of my blog, here is a post I have meant to put up about a painting I did a few weeks ago. This painting has gotten some nice comments from my friends, and I'm pretty happy with it, too. I don't want to add a lot of description so that it can be up to the reader's interpretation:

Anyway, enjoy this post and I'll try to get my apartment cleaned up to find the cord.

Another Lantern

Thanks for all of the comments recently, everyone. I wasn't thinking about quitting posting or anything, I was just a little curious if anyone was still reading. So definitely thanks for still reading, too.

Here is a lantern that I completed (over a week ago now) and I'm really happy with. I started by drawing four circular nodes on the lantern, two near the top and two near the bottom. Then I connected them with some arcs that formed sort of a triangular shape. The colors are a gradation between yellow and purple.

The triangle

The node

Thanks for reading!

Some Painted Things

Ooooh, another painting post. Let's see what it is. First is this painting I did based on a drop of water causing ripples in a surface of water. I of course jazzed it up by discretizing the surface into a bunch of square type shapes. I think it turned out well:

Here is the image I based the painting on:

So next is what I'm really excited about. I picked up lanterns the last time I was in Insadong, and have since painted one. It's really great because I feel like I'm painting in three dimensions. My first painted lantern is sort of a two sided sunset with trees. Theres suns at both ends and trees are coming from both ends.

Here's how the trees interact:

It is a lantern, so this is what it might look like with an internal light:

I have another lantern almost finished that I'll post about soon.

Paintings, and a Hiatus Explanation

Hi everyone. First, as I have done often (at least a few times) on this blog, I am posting a few of my recent paintings. This first one I did a few months ago. It's with my recent obsession of fractals and trying to incorporate them into paintings. I took a black and white image from a book on fractals (Mandelbrodt: "The Fractal Geometry of Nature" if you are interested) and traced it onto paper, added some color and a sun and stuff.

Fractal II:

This one is similar to some paintings I have done in the past, but with the inclusion of five different vanishing points. can you find them all?

Wormhole:

As hinted at in the title of this post, I'm going to consider February as somewhat of a hiatus. I know that readers of this blog are disappointed with the amount of posting lately, but I just need a little break. I have ideas for posts coming up so I plan to resume regular updates in March. Check back then for more travel adventures, paintings, and school children debauchery!

Mixed Signals

A few weeks ago, I received an interesting gift. One of my students painted and rolled up this picture:

So okay, it's a nice abstract semi-incomprehensible painting done by a four year old kid. Inside was this:

Ahhh, isn't that sweet? My student, Iris, wants me to go to her church.

But it was a few short weeks before that that another student gave me a gift:

This is actually a bible, but the pages were wetted so that they rolled up and formed this kind of huge crazy cylinder. It's pretty cool actually. If you look closely you can see that it has both English and Korean versions of the bible.

So are the odds that one student would give me an invitation to her Christian church, while another would spend some time desecrating a bible and then give it to me? Well, let's take a look at the religious makeup of Korea. According to Wikipedia, it is as follows:

Christian: 29%

Buddhists: 23%

Pretty much nuthin': 46%

Hmm, so that pretty much makes sense, although I'm slightly more likely to be given the blasphemous bible by one of my students if you go by straight percentages. One thing though, this bible ended up making a sweet paint brush holder.

Mmmm, sacrelicious.

Some Paintings

So I guess it's once again been about a week since any postings were put up here. Oops. I'm working on getting a few up before November is over. For now I have a few more paintings to post.

This first one I wanted to make look like a tunnel with a light at the end of it. I think it turned out pretty well. Here is "Tunnel Light":

One of my interests lately has been in fractals, which is a geometric shape that can be split into parts that are similar on different size scales. That's not the best explanation, but check out the wikipedia link if you are interested.

Anyway this is a painting I made with a hexagonal shape I like a lot, and then in the center of the hexagonal shapes is a repeat of what is around it. I think this one turned out OK, I'm not super happy with the colors I chose. It's just an experiment on paper, so no big deal.

"Fractal One":

And, a zoomed in view:
One more zoomed in view:

Swine Flu and More Halloween, Too

So the storm of swine flu has reached Korea, and the fear has reached ridiculous heights. My worst fear has happened, every teacher is now required to wear a mask while at work. Come on. Seriously? I consider wear a mask to be more inconvenient that getting a light case of the flu for a few days. Besides, it's actually pretty important that the kids have the ability to see our mouths while we are speaking.

One possible bright side: the schools in the area might close in order to stop the spreading. I would not mind one bit having a week off. So, do I dare say hooray swine flu?

And here is me in a mask, in case anyone was wondering.

Does it help bring out my blue eyes?

I just have to say why, Chorizo, why did you have to bring this terrible curse on the world?

OK, I'll lighten the mood with pictures of some halloween activities. For all of my afternoon classes last Friday I had them paint some little oranges with acrylic paint to look like jack-0-lanterns. There is no better way to kill a half an hour.

Age 8 kids

One of my favs from that class

Age 9 kids, who seem to lack any creativity.

Age 11 kids

another favorite

and another good one

One of the strange things I've noticed is the fact that in general the smart kids who study hard show little to no creativity, while the horrible students make the great art work. Have any other teachers noticed this?