Christmas Gifts

These arent the best photos but here's some of the gifts I made for people this year. First up, for my mom I did an illustration of Krampus for her. My mom LOVES Christmas. Growing up her and my father really made Christmas a magical time for my brother and I. She would go all out on the decorations and before we went to bed Christmas Eve would play a little record she had as a child of The Night Before Christmas. A few weeks ago, kind of as a joke we went to go see Krampus together. I had heard that the first half hour of the movie was basically Christmas Vacation and the rest was Gremlins. Well yeah it was just like Gremlins if in Gremlins they had clown puppets with teeth filled gaping mouths eating kids and psychotic angel puppets strangling people. I remember when I saw King Kong in the theater one of the most disturbing scenes in the movie was when a bunch of the characters fell into a pit full of giant insects and worst of all - LAMPREYS. And I think the most disturbing part of it for me was the music which wasn't heroic and adventury, but really quiet and almost hypnotic....but there was a part like that in Krampus and I really began to feel bad for taking my mom to see it... p.s. she actually held up better than I did, probably because of my existing fear of clowns....I guess maybe instead of painting her a Krampus I should have gone in the complete opposite direction and painted her a nice classic looking Santa....maybe thats what I'll do for her next year. I will say this though, not too long after I started painting it, I wished I had stained the paper before hand to give it a more classic old look .....I thought about spray fixing the final painting then doing an acrylic glaze over the whole thing, but sometimes the spray fix doesn't completely fix those ink and I was afraid the red background would end up getting smeared....next time though....

For my dad I finally finished up this painting I started back in June of my grandfather Goad who passed away in 2006. I've always been kind of intimidated painting realistic portraits of people, but I've realized that if I don't focus on the resemblance as a whole but instead just look at shapes, value, and the relationship between all these things its easier for me....just something that needed to click in my head I guess....once I get to a certain point I'll graduate to painting with oils, but some people say my paint style resembles oils anyway.....

For my brother, who is a rabid supporter of Ford I did another portrait, this time of Henry Ford. Sorry about the picture quality...I was working up to the last minute on this one and had to snap a quick pic...

For my sister-in-law I painted a portrait of Jettison, her and my brother's dog who passed away earlier this year....I was actually surprised how much enjoyment I got out of doing this piece as I have a little complex about doing pictures of pets. It just reminds me of caricature artists or something.....but it's one thing for someone to have me paint a portrait of a pet I've never met and another thing if it's a pet I'm familiar with....I guess what I'm saying is it helps to have that personal connection....

I also did an abstract painting for my Grandma but unfortunately forgot to get a pic of it....but everybody seemed to like their gifts, although as would be expected the painting of Jettison was bittersweet.