Work in Progress: Bowling Balls

Me holding a bowling ball at Wizard World Con in January

As I said in my last blog post, I will be appearing at the Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle at the end of March selling copies of all of my books, drawing sketches, doing on-the-spot perspective critiques, and all the other stuff I do at cons. I will also be bringing along the project that has been preoccupying me for most of the year: a series of three spherical cartoon paintings on bowling balls which nicely combine two of my main interests, comics and unusual forms of perspective.

David Chelsea is reading:

The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe

by David I. Kertzer

Each of the paintings depict a typical contemporary scene: a comics convention, a figure drawing session, and a video store. I originally conceived of them as installments in my very irregular Anapest comic strip series, so in each of them the dialog is rhymed.

The video store painting may already be a period piece. In doing visual research I turned up many images of empty and derelict video stores, and also video stores festooned with signs saying GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE, HALF OFF, and the like.

The figure drawing painting is based on a drawing of Spring Street Studio in New York City which I blogged about two or three years ago. The Comic Con painting is based on a panoramic drawing which I blogged about here.

My working method involves painting over a lightweight rubber bowling ball in acrylic. I plugged the holes with acrylic molding paste. I applied perspective lines using my own method of spherical perspective with six vanishing points; one for each point at the compass as well as up and down (the method is explicated in chapter five of my book EXTREME PERSPECTIVE!) . The painting was done with a combination of craft acrylics (the kind used for painting dollhouses) and Daler-Rowney acrylic artists ink.

Feel free to drop by my table at artists alley where all three will be on display. Afterwards, they are to be auctioned online. Information about that will be in a future blog post.