Some Art I'm Working On

A week or so ago Allison and I went to the Museum of Art and checked out the traveling exhibit on Andy Warhol and his car inspired art. Most of what Warhol did I don't really dig, but some of it is super cool. One of the reasons I like it is that he took images and screen printed them onto his canvas/paper and painted over or under the print. All these layers are pretty cool and since I've been doing some screen printing too I kinda got inspired to mess around some myself. Here is the results so far.....

Warhol took this ad, had a screen made of it (this was in the 60's where it wasn't so easy to make the screens at home).

Then he used that screen as well as some paint to make this. What he did was do some sketching with a pencil where the screen would print then painted some highlights. Next he did the screen printing then did some more detail painting over that. On other versions he did things a little differently, but by using the screen they all have the same basic image, just done if different ways.

He also made this one and quite a few others like it too. Like I said before, the cool thing about the screen is that he could reuse the image many times and in different ways to get something new every time.

What I did was use the old t-shirt screen I made up before with Spenser riding Negra Pantaloons. I taped over the text then screened the image onto some canvas. The one on the right was my first try. I didn't have any paint yet so I was using screen printing ink for the bike and the grass. The next day I bought some acrylic paints and played around some more, but I still hated how the grass came out.  The picture on the left was my second attempt, when I bought the paint I also bought a pad of canvas that was not attached to a frame so it is easier to work with. I also did some color mixing to get the grass to look a little better to me.

Another view.

Here is the second attempt almost finished. I had all the basic colors on there, but hadn't done any detail work yet. After the paint dried I went back and added some red and black highlights.

I think it came out pretty decent. I won't have art galleries beating down my door, but it'll look cool on my man cave wall.

A little closer so you can see the details better. The screen ink likes to spread some when it's used on canvas giving a kind of ghost edge but most of the details are still visible.

So that's what I've done so far with my inspiration provided by ol' Andy. I have some more ideas to try, but you'll have to wait to see how those turn out.
Later....