Beluga

 

The branch of the organization I work at is named WALES, an acronym for Working Adults Learning Empowering Skills. It's spelled like the country, but we usually use symbolism from the aquatic mammals that share a pronunciation.

Most of the rooms in the building are based on whales, and as the In-House Facilitator, my room was the Beluga Room. However, I recently was promoted to a Community Facilitator, which means that my office moved to the Narwhal Room. To honour my time in the Beluga Room, I made this painting.

I'd like to paint a narwhal to honour my new office, especially because they're so distinct, but to be honest I still rely a little on reference images and somehow, I can't find any good images of narwhals on the Internet.

I like this painting. It's pretty simple. The only colour used in it is blue, which is managed by white and black. The whale looks cheerful and it makes me happy when I look at it. I didn't go for complex shading, but I think the angling does the job of capturing perspective and motion.

Elephant Sunset, Fruit Bowl, Peppers

Finally did a few paintings at the new place. Pretty similar to some of the stuff in Guelph. Along with these, I also tried to do a painting of carrots, onions and potatoes. In the end, I felt like its' shortcomings were too many to display. Too bad, since I feel like I've done well with carrots and onions before, but they've always been with things that didn't work. This time, I was worried that the potatoes would look like poop, in a literal way. I managed to make them communicate as potatoes, but somehow I screwed up the carrot and onions, which were the things I had confidence in.

Here's my Elephant With Radiating Sunset. I tried the sunset against silhouette trick for the first time during a painting activity that a guest presenter did for us while I was working at the Summer Program. The elephant with baobab tree is a classic look, but it's usually done with mostly black, red, and yellow. For this, I used contrasting colours flowing into and overlapping each other. If I had any regrets, I'd say the elephant is too big. Since the elephant is known to be large, it's supposed to be dwarfed by the baobab tree, giving the viewer a feeling of smallness. The elephant looks like it could eat that tree like a broccoli.

Did a similar fruit bowl in a previous post. In this one, we've got a pear instead of a mango. I liked the mango in the last one, but I guess this is a more classic quartet of fruit. The blue bowl is supposed to contrast the orange tablecloth and also the orange fruit. I really like painting bananas. Their grooves make for nice, clean shadows.

Here we've got four bell peppers. I've already done a painting like this, but it's in Guelph so I thought I'd do another one since I enjoyed the first one so much. If I had to choose a favourite food to paint, it would be bell peppers. Similar to the bananas, they have grooves that are nice and clean, and easily give a sense of direction and dimensionality. For this one, I thought the stem on the red bell pepper didn't have as much dimensionality as I would have liked, and I thought the colour of the green pepper was off through-and-through. It's too dark. I kept comparing the paint on my knife to the pepper, and it kept looking almost turquoise, so I kept darkening it until I knew it was to an absurd extent, and despite how it looked against the pepper, on the canvas it was too dark. The other shadows on it are also too dark, almost black, and it doesn't really make sense that its' stem should be darker than the stems on the other peppers. I still think it overall kind of works, because the viewer knows what it is in the context of the other peppers, but really, the green pepper brings everything down a bit. I think in my last painting, the green pepper looked the worst too. Don't know why that specific shade of pepper is so challenging for me.

Apples, People, and a Cat

This was another still life. The green bowl was meant to compliment the red table cloth. The red and pink apples were meant to compliment the bowl.

I'm kind of proud of this one, considering I did it quickly and spontaneously.

This is Mom and Luna. I'm afraid I never mastered painting animals, but I might post some of my attempts in the future. Luna was one of three cats back home in Guelph. She was the youngest, and unexpectedly passed from liver and kidney failure. My mother was especially close to her. This is a take on her Facebook profile picture.

I painted three images of me, my borther, and my mother. My mom accepted the images of me and Duncan, but rejected the image of herself. Here's hoping that she will be able to accept it with the memory of Lunca

Malian clothes, gryphon, and sunset

Me in Malian garb. I don't have much to say for this one, except that Mali has a really cool way of fashioning your clothes. You take a piece of cloth with a design you think is cool, then you take it to a tailor. They take your measurements, ask you how you want it made, and create it to your specifications.

The Malian clothes were durable, fashionable, and comfortable. They were like a karate gi you can wear for every day events. I wish we had a similar clothing system here.

Kind of an emblem-style gryphon. You know how most countries have a "crest"? This was done in that style. A gryphon is supposed to be part lion and part eagle, but how that looks has been depicted quite differently throughout history.

I find that many depictions of the gryphon are too eagle-heavy, with the head, wings and forequarters being eagle-based, and the hindquartes being lion. Conversely, I've seen depictions of gryphons which were just a lion with wings.

My perfect gryphon has the face, wings, talons, and tail of an eagle, with the mane, ears, and hindquarters of a lion.

Many eagle-heavy depictions of a gryphon still have lion ears and I enjoy that. Most depictions don't include the mane, but since I am a bearded man, and a male gryphon, with the mane being the most prominent symbol of a male lion, I don't see why it should be excluded.

I have watched the episode of The Magic School Bus regarding flight, and so I appreciate tail feathers and I can't justify a lion's tail replacing them.

This won't describe my own personal philosophy, but if I were to break down the colours:

Purple background: Royal origins (purple dyes were once the most difficult to produce and thus often reserved for people of well-respected families)
Gold lion fur: Financial success (gold has been associated with rare and precious minerals such as... well, gold)
Red claws: military prowess (colour of blood)
White feathers: Purity of ambition (unstained by doubts, represents faith)

If all that sounds like garbage.... Remember, I don't stand for anything. It's just a cool-looking crest.

A painting I did as an activity in a year of Summer Program that I thought turned out better than expected. It should be a sunset, and it doesn't make a ton of sense that the darkest colours surround the sun, and fade into lighter tones. I thought about trying to recreate the image, with lighter colours fading to dark, but I realised that the reason it looks good is because the bright sun contrasts the dark colours surrounding it, and the silhouette of the tree contrasts the lighter tones. So it doesn't make sense, but I doubt I could improve it.

The instructor was real impressed by it, and wanted to take my picture with it. I was proud, but couldn't help but wonder if she noticed I was wearing a staff shirt. I shouldn't necessarily need that boost...

Peppers, Bananas, Faces, and Paint Night

This is a still life with four different colours of bell peppers. I chose a blue table cloth to complement the orange pepper. My favourite peppers in this image are the orange and yellow ones. I gave this image to my mother and brother in Guelph.

I feel like bell peppers have some of the most "attitude" in the vegetable kingdom. They have those vibrant, diverse colours and grooves....

This painting replaced "Stirfry Ingredients" which I'd donated home. That one involved carrots, bell peppers, snow peas, onion, and cauliflower. I botched the cauliflower, but my family wouldn't take down the image until I offered them something better. "Bell Peppers" is simpler, but better

This is another still life. It's a bowl of fruit with an apple, a pear, a mango, and a bunch of bananas, The apple and mango should complement the bowl, but I find the bananas are what really draw attention. This was my first still-life that I did based on my own initiative. Previously, I'd done one during an art class I took in University.  This is another painting donated to home

My brother on the left, and myself on the right. My brother's is based on his Facebook profile picture at the time. I'd like to learn how to create a gloss effect, because I think that would have really improved how his glasses look. Right now, I kind of just drew the frames.

The orange background is supposed to compliment Duncan's blue shirt, and the green background, is supposed to compliment my reddish shirt. I actually did a painting with my mother having a yellow-purple contrast to complete the set, but she didn't like it, so I'm not including it here.

I look really sheepish in my picture, which wasn't the intention. My reference image was my profile picture when I worked as an Independent Facilitator. This painting was my second attempt at a profile painting. My first happened to be someone with a darker skin tone, and when I did myself, I thought that I just needed to do the same formula, but with more white paint. I was wrong, the colour blue needs to be omitted when painting someone of caucasian descent, and I ran out of white paint when I was  making it, so unfortunately, the initial attempt had me dark-skinned and wearing bright red lipstick. As I painted over it, my recreated image seemed to remember it's unfortunate origins, resulting in it's embarrassed expression.

I went to something called a Paint Night, where an instructor teaches an audience to recreate an image. I'm the image on the left, and my girlfriend is on the right. Y'all are going to commentate that my best painting is the one where someone gives me a reference image and tells me how to do it. Fair enough.

Everyone in the course drew a denser forest than in the reference. I don't know how they did it, but the reference image gave really thin trees that complimented the background.

Lee-Anne definitely has a more cosmic and awe-inspiring sky. I don't know what the "white accents" were supposed to be, but her's look a bit like Aurora Borealis, while mine look like smoke rising from the water. I think I had nice, smooth edges on my forest, and the reflection on my island looks nice.

Patrice Butts Fund Beard-Off

One of my final assignments for the Social Service Worker program was to do a fundraising event for the Patrice Butts Fund, which acts as an emergency support for Social Service Worker students facing financial crisis. One of the events that my team decided to do was shaving my iconic beard of five years. For $250 I would shave my beard, and the highest bidder would get to choose a facial hair style that I would wear and maintain for a week before completing the shave.

This is my standard look. A professional, trimmed beard.

One of the stipulations to the event was that I had to grow it out as long as possible before the day of the shave. I judged the length by testing how many pencils it could hold. At its maximum length, it was strong enough to hold 14 pencils!

On the day of the event, the highest bidder, with $100, had selected to pluck three hairs off the left side of my beard. Since this left the class feeling dissatisfied, we put it off a day and the social work students made a collaborative effort and vote which resulted in an extra $114.75 and left me looking like this.

A week later, before finishing the shave, I had some fun and experimented with different styles. Because my chosen style took off my chin hair, I didn't get to do a goatee or soul patch. But here I am with a handlebar moustache.

Standard moustache.

And finally, clean shaven.

In the end, I got:

$46.50 cash
$31.25 to save it
$261 from online donations
$114.75 in the final class bid

$453.50 total

Almost twice our original goal of $250!

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