So as promised here are some in action shots of me painting my latest work “Dark Starry Knight” I switched to acrylic paint for this project, and I am working at a larger scale. I wanted to mimic Van Gogh’s brushwork as best I could; that meant watercolor was out, and even though the original was done in oils, I did not have the funds to purchase such supplies for my own work, so that left me with the poor man’s oils, acrylics. I used heavy body gel medium to mix with the paint, this helped add some chunky-ness to my paint that mimicked Van Gogh’s heavy amount of paint that he placed on his canvas. To speed up my process, I used a projector to cast a really low res version of Starry Night onto my canvas. Once the basic forms were there, I went at it with my chunk of graphite and added my version of things to the design. Then onto painting. I started with the sky, doing a lot of on canvas mixing of paint. I tried to start with larger areas of color, and move into more detailed work as the larger areas would dry. Once the blues of the sky were mostly in place, I attacked the yellows.  At this point I could see the end product in my head. The building came next, along with the bat signal itself, and every so often, I would add a few more strokes of blue or white to the sky, never truly satisfied at it’s completeness. I continued moving down the piece, adding the buildings and Joker’s balloon. The last bits of the painting to be complete was the Joker gas clouding over the town. The original painting just had trees, and they were mostly blue. My gas is quite a bit more green, however due to the nature of Van Gogh’s work, I still think

that my gas clouds look like trees, no matter what I tried to do to change them.

This painting was also my excuse to finally buy an 11 x 17 scanner. I hate stitching my paintings together in Photoshop, it’s such a time waster. However, due to this painting’s size, I still had to scan it 8 times to get the full image into my computer.

The original painting has already sold, but Prints are available to anyone who might like to purchase one.

Appreciate it!

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