I don’t understand how people can reserve scorn for Justing Beepy Eeper when that “catch a grenade for ya” guy is still on the loose.

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Perhaps you have wondered what, apart from my championship ego-mania and being the first person to ever have a relationship go badly have prevented me from maintaining a regular update schedule. And perhaps not; I’ve had quite enough of it.

It started out easily enough. I was to create a “series” of painted images with some sort of unifying theme. I couldn’t think of one in the time I was given because it coincided with the inadequate time I was given to do several other tasks I wasn’t qualified for. I decided to show a pointless creature going on a pointless journey, which would make the lack of a point the point. I was not enthusiastic about that idea but also figured that I could change my mind and construct a point while I was making the first. I could not.

The second image is a version I made on the computer first to assist in making the first actual painting, so in fact this came first but I chose to show it second. It occurs to me that I have referred to this image and the third image, the second painting, as simply “the second,” and that is most confusing. Ah fiddlesticks.

People on the internet statistically liked the fake unfinished one I did in a few hours about as much as the real one that I did across two weeks, but as the fake one is more directly compatible with the internet, and I’m used to not being impressed with what people on the internet are impressed with anyhow this is probably a personal triumph. Though I say “people on the internet” with a derogatory implication I am obviously not talking about you. You’re so pathetic I know you couldn’t handle it.

Nonethefewer the painting looks nice enough in person. Impressive considering that at 24×18 inches, it was four times 11×9, the size I’m used to not being comfortable working at. It even merely looks like I didn’t feel like mixing paint, rather than my having no idea how to do it.

The specifications of the second image are the same, apart from being perpendicular. I do not feel this functions as well, overall. I am accustomed to making pictures with horizontal orientations, two dimensional layouts, stage perspectives, in deserts, that have nothing to do with the pictures that came before them. I am accustomed to snow but not recently. The only things I was comfortable with were the balloon and the goat, those being the most out of place elements.
The biggest difference between this painting and the first is that regardless of art website approval points nobody but me cares about the first actually looks better than the grubby computer version I made to assist in the painting’s creation. Assisting its superiority was that I was so preoccupied with inventing a resolution to appear in the next painting that I forgot I didn’t need to compulsively obey the pixel arrangement. I made it to help and now it’s just being a jerk. Also I never arrived at a resolution.

This painting I did not even want to go to the trouble to scan in 5 parts. That does it slightly better justice than digital camera interpretations, but I do not feel it is entitled to justice. It is a reprobate ne’erdowell. I didn’t want to scan it until I had fixed the parts that I didn’t like, but once I had done that it would be another month before I could place that into the scanner without damaging one or both. Though I can’t say that neither deserves it.

Initially I wanted a sunset, but then that would mean the figures would be backlit, which I imagined was undesirable. So I had to depict the side of the sky opposite from a sunset, the boring side. It being still pinkish but less interesting. It didn’t occur to me that sunlight reflects, rather powerfully, off snow-covered surfaces, and further that nobody cares what direction cartoon characters are lit from. Also that this goat is in fact a sorceror of black magic who is immune to light sources.
The picture on the whole needs more “light.” However, at the time, I lacked the time to give it light before I started the third painting. Now I have the time but despise the deed. Anyway here comes another.

This one, thankfully, benefut a great amount from the scan procedure. I again tried to take photographs of it, but the noirish-mixture reacted to light in a consistently inconsistent manner apart from the other colors. However, the bland uniformity it takes from the scan isn’t so splendid either. Alas, lamentation, woe and whatnot.

Since it was supposed to be a “series,” and I knew I had no goal, the only way to grasp at cohesion was to put as many elements as possible in all three images. By the third, this largely prevented me from including anything else! Yet it is clear that I tried. It’s clear I tried because I said I tried and if I was going to lie about myself I’d tell better ones than that.
And now I’m annoyed at myself for not working the goat into this one. The goat seems reliable.

Aw beets you know you’ve run out of ideas when you have to put your dorks in space. Even the Leprechaun and the Critters didn’t take their pointy-toothed ghostly floating heads there until their fourth respective, respectable films. I can at least assure you that my fourth and fifth paintings are already “done” and neither conspicuously takes place in The Hood.

Oh now we’ve done it. Wonderful. My paintings officially remind me of Rygar. Now you know the real reason I’ve been depressed the last few weeks.

Moon scenes work when they are desolate and peaceful. My paineding is incapable of being peaceful because it is full of little objects of all different colors (and also that honorable faceless warriors the likes of Rygar are unemployed during peace time). The lighting doesn’t make sense because I imagined most of the light was coming off the earth-like planet orb, and so the shadows should go away from it. Yet if they did then the foreground figure would, once again, be backlit which wasn’t what I wanted. My solution was to light the characters from the front and the terrain from the back. Which isn’t a solution at all because it just looks like I have no idea how light works. Rather, I have a weak, ineffectual grasp. And yetter if the Earth is lit that’s only because the sun shines at it, and the earth’s light is a mere reflection, so in fact the shadows should be reversed. And yettest to face the sun directly while in the minimal lunar atmosphere would be painfully blinding and there’s no way this creature can read its map. Yes that’s supposed to be a map. Although it is lost so clearly it cannot read its map. Conclusion: This isn’t one.

As for the sky itself, again realistic references were a problem. None of them showed any stars. None of them showed any galaxies or color variation. The stuff that makes space fun to look at. The stuff that makes space fun to fill!

Here is a photograph of the stupid moon car taken on the moon. Very grey, no stars, no atmosphere, painful unfiltered light, obscure shadows.

Here is a crummy online representation of a painting that somebody more competent and compositionally imaginative than myself made prior to technology allowing cameras to go to the moon to take photographs from on it. Lots of stars, reasonable light, lots of shadow, lots of temperature. If I’d looked at this kind of thing instead of photographs I’d have done fine.

In fact I DID look at made up silliness but only for the sake of copying and didn’t consider the thought involved in the collective context within which I located the object to be copied. So I’m a hypocrite and a lousy copier. I’m also a terrible dancer.
Fahhhb. And for all I know this kind of thing is more accurate anyway and the cameras just mess stuff up when used outside on sunny days.

In which event my painting is still true to life. Life is often disappointing.

except when it’s worse.

Which being consistent with my expectations is not a disappointment at all and therefore not an exception. Which means Windows 95 isn’t going to lock up today, which is very good news, considering that I’ve already condemned myself to Rygar dreams after I post this.