Curmudge's Sutff

This is the year.

2026-03-30T22:07:12Z

This is the year I re-invent myself.

I didn't choose this year, more like it chose me... and why now, I don't know. But there it is — I can feel it. This year I re-invent myself as a cartoonist, as a painter, and [if I can manage to tackle poetry] as a writer, too.

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critters

2025-12-28T17:19:16Z

My 14^th gouache is a Bohemian waxwing — I was quite taken by the incredibly vivid reds and yellows in the wings and tail, they were fun. 8 x 10, watercolour paper mounted on cardboard: a surface I found in Dollar Tree and have since stocked up on. I find it a very handy work surface for gouache.

My 63^rd acrylic is a seasonal Golden Lab. Got organic greens by mixing yellow and black: a trick I picked up a while back and still get a kick out of. 10 x 10, canvas.

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paintbrush accessories

2025-12-04T18:00:20Z

My drying racks for my paintbrushes. The black suction-cup one is apparently intended for makeup brushes, but works fine for my art brushes with fatter handles, too...

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something I am grateful for today

2025-11-23T01:07:45Z

scoring a humongous bargoon on canvases

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July 2025

2025-10-24T21:47:00Z

My 62^nd acrylic is a further exploration of a limited palette I discovered while working on a previous abstract. I got quite excited working with those colours (and their respective values). I really like how they look and work together, so I have stocked up on those paints and hope to do a lot of different things with them in future.

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No Idea: 1967

2025-10-19T18:24:24Z

My 61^st acrylic is another in my projected No Idea series.

( the 'story' behind it )

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No Idea: 1965

2025-10-05T17:51:11Z

My 60^th acrylic is another in my projected No Idea series.

( the story behind it )

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No Idea: 1960

2025-09-04T01:16:05Z

My 59^th acrylic is another in my projected No Idea series.

( the story behind it )

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No Idea: 1962

2025-08-29T20:15:50Z

My 58^th acrylic is sorta my 55^th because I did the underdrawing for it back in January, then left it untouched til now. An attempt to let Expressionism [and maybe Fauvism] inform my approach a bit more than usual.

( the story behind it )

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Dalmatian

2025-04-12T20:25:16Z

I am calling this my eleventh gouache painting, even though technically that isn't correct: this was done on a 4-by-6 canvas board and all my other gouaches were on paper, and the paint calls itself acrylic paint rather than gouache. Bear with me while I explain:

This was my first time trying Deco Earth brand “reclaimed acrylic” paint — claims to be more opaque and more matte finish than regular acrylic. The opaque is maybe a bit true, but the matte finish is way true. It's a lot like working with acrylic gouache IMHO — hence my labelling it such. Handles nice and I look forward to working with it again. (Even though the range of pigments available to work with leaves a little to be desired, I think.)

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Sands

2025-02-17T22:07:05Z

My 56^th acrylic is, once again, a visual that mysteriously popped into my head and stayed there. (As usually happens with any abstract that I feel moved to pursue to completion.) There's something about this colour palette that seems to connect with me, seeing as I used this same one last year. I can see me using these colours to sub for the white/gray/black palette I'm accustomed to working with in my cartooning, and doing value studies that way. (I even have a vague idea for the next one...)

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pups

2025-01-19T20:01:52Z

My 52^nd and 53^rd acrylics are, as you can see, both pups. One is a gift, one is for putting up at the cafe and [hopefully] selling. I've already realized that my animal paintings are the closest I get to “crowd-pleasers”. So, when it comes time to make a gift, that's what I fall back on. But I've also already begun to wonder how much these paintings actually qualify as fine art. Like, do they say anything? Do they express anything about me? Maybe they're just an expression of “my love of animals”, and maybe that's enough, I dunno....

On the other hand, I can think of an artist I see on Instagram who only ever paints horses, and she quite cheerfully admits that's all she ever has any intention of painting, because that's what she loves most. And I've never questioned her legitimacy as An Artist®, so why do I need to question my own?

On the third hand, lately I've gotten more of an urge to spend at least some of my easel time working on less accessible pieces — I can feel things in me wanting to get out. I've already resigned myself to those new pieces not being understood or enjoyed, but I still feel like they'll be worth trying anyway.

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latest paintings

2024-12-31T20:58:11Z

My 51^st acrylic is a nocturne of the Christmas fair at Hebden Bridge, which we visited in 2018. I got into how the night suggests rather than displays things, and really got into the depths of the lights on the tree. There's no razzle dazzle in this work, but I feel like maybe there's some honesty about a night I remember fondly.

My tenth gouache is a horned owl in the snow. This was my first time using an angle brush — I only recently picked up a few of those, in both bristle and soft synthetic — and I really enjoyed how it handled. I can see myself using them a lot in future. And, once again, the limited palette I have felt my way into for animal paintings came in handy here.

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something I am grateful for today

2024-12-18T22:54:57Z

Getting back into The Painting Groove®.

It's been weeks [months?] since I painted, largely due to adverse health circumstances, but also lack of ideas-slash-inspiration. But the deadline of Christmas looming has been making me fret, and I owe some people paintings as gifts, so I finally panicked enough to force myself once more into the breach.

I've noticed that, whenever I'm away from painting for a while, I eventually get to feeling like I have forgotten how. I lose what little confidence I've developed, and start to believe that whatever I produce now won't be any good. [Something similar happens with cartooning, but that feels more like gotten rusty than don't remember how.] But, in the last couple of days, I have finished the gifts that absolutely had to be done, and once I got about a third of the way into each one, I realized that they were turning out Okay Enough®, and I started feeling like I have a clue again.

I realize that the solution is “don't go so long without arting”, but this is me we're talking about here, so....

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corgi

2024-09-02T13:02:43Z

My 48^th acrylic painting is supposed to be a corgi. This one was also a gift, so once again I found myself fussing with it a bit more than the loose, expressionist-slash-fauvist look I hope to cultivate someday. And again, I find myself doing a lot of drybrush work when painting an animal, even though I can't remember drybrush ever being discussed as a typical acrylic technique. For me, it just feels like the right thing to do here.

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quiet observation

2024-08-16T13:09:15Z

Over the past five years, I have read a lot of books, articles, posts, etc. about "how to paint". Most of them offer advice along the lines of things you should or shouldn't do. Rules, or at least rules of thumb.

In that same period, I have seen each one of those rules broken [successfully] by at least one artist producing a good piece in their own lawless fashion. Sometimes that artist has even been me!

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update

2024-05-25T01:18:35Z

This morning I learned a bit more about my Sheltie sale. Apparently, it was bought by a lady who owned a Sheltie for seventeen years and was very fond of it. And the painting reminded her of hers, so that moved her to get it. This is exactly the sort of buyer I was hoping to get for that piece, and I feel like it found a good home.

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something I am grateful for today

2024-05-19T21:39:56Z

Selling a painting: someone bought the Sheltie a couple days ago. Making a sale is still such a novelty for me that it feels like a big deal. [To be fair, I always felt that that painting had the most curb appeal of any of mine, so I always expected it to be the one that would go.]

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Hoard

2024-05-12T16:45:37Z

My 47^th acrylic is [clearly] an abstract — black border added digitally to brighten the look of the warm colours on-screen. This piece feels like an important lesson/step forward for me... in that I can be reasonably sure that no one else will like it [so far, no one has], but I am confident in it anyway. I had a clear idea what I wanted to do, and I can see that I did it. So for the first time with an abstract, I feel like I don't need external validation to make it feel worth doing. P.S.: photos really don't do justice to these colours, but I have to make do.

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spaniel

2024-04-28T23:50:22Z

My 45^th acrylic is a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. [I'm showing it after #46 cuz this one was a gift and I waited til it was received before making it public.] I find myself wondering if I should've made the green background lighter so that the dog's head would stand out more distinctly. But I also realize that I like how the dog's brown and the background green are similar in value, to create fewer, larger and simpler shapes of light and dark values, to make a stronger composition. I am unusually aware this time of the distinction between how the work functions as composition vs. as depiction.

[It also made me realize how often I make decisions like this in cartooning, composition vs. depiction, and I realize that, in that medium, clarity of depiction is always most important. Sometimes we downplay conventional rules of composition to make the image communicate with more clarity and immediacy.]

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cat

2024-04-25T18:18:37Z

My 46^th acrylic is a cat. [Like the chihuahua earlier, it was done from a photo in an old calendar.] I don't love this one but I'm done with it — not my best, not my worst. I feel like any further fussing with it will just make it tighter, and I also feel like tighter wouldn't necessarily make this one better. The looseness of suggesting the floral print on the duvet was my fave part to do, as it happens. Onward.

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something I am grateful for today

2024-02-29T12:41:55Z

learning something about my self-talk

I had a sudden epiphany today. [This may sound painfully obvious to you, but it's new to me, bear with me, okay?]:

I was looking at one of my paintings, and suddenly asked myself, "What would I say about this painting if a friend made it and showed it to me?" And I realized I would be much more positive and encouraging — and really mean everything I said. So why not say those same things about the same painting when it's made by me?

Why not, indeed?

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chihuahua

2024-02-17T19:08:56Z

My 44^th acrylic is a dog. [I feel like I need to tell people.] Having done a few animals now, I realize I have gradually felt my way toward a go-to palette for them: parchment, unbleached titanium, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, transparent burnt umber, and Payne's gray. Most of the critters I've tackled can be done with just those few, and little need to add a dot of any other colour. [I did put a dot of alizarin crimson inside the ears here...]

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latest paintings

2023-12-25T13:15:36Z

My latest paintings were both Christmas presents so I had to wait til their recipients got them before making them public, so here we go now:

My eighth gouache is supposedly a chipmunk. I still struggle with getting my paint to a good working consistency — straight from the tube it's too thick to spread easily, but it feels like when I add any water it instantly goes as thin as watercolour. There's a sweet spot in between that I keep missing.

My 43^rd acrylic is my house, as seen from across the street. You can't see much of the actual house frontage and porch from here, so it looks like mostly garage, but there is enough house back there to live in. Any other angle would be mostly tree, so if I wanted to get the whole building in, this was the best I could do.

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Sheltie

2023-10-19T20:54:56Z

My 42^nd acrylic painting is a fairly conscious effort to go back to something a bit more accessible than the abstract I did last time. I used some of the same drybrush I did with that chinchilla earlier, and once again I find it a helpful technique for this sort of piece.

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