Benches On Parade - Part 1

Benches On Parade is a community art project in Rochester that involves a variety of artists painting fiberglass benches that will be displayed around the city this coming summer. I'm lucky enough to be one of the artists who gets to participate in this project! Most of the benches are being sponsored by companies in Rochester. I'm painting a bench for Harris RF Communications. These benches are quite large, measuring about 6 feet wide by 5 feet tall.



I'm storing the bench that I'm working on in Rochester, so on days that I'm not teaching I've been driving back to work on it. My bench is inspired by art deco design, with a slightly abstracted nod to Harris's ties to the global communications field.





So far I've mapped out most of the design on the bench. I've been taping off areas to paint in large blocks of color before I get into the details. Today I'm going to be filling in all of the blue areas of color and tomorrow I'll most likely really start getting into the details. A visit to the art store will probably be involved too - a bench this big requires a lot of acrylic paint!

Fused Glass Jewelry

I recently got to experiment with making fused glass jewelry. I didn't get too advanced with my designs, but concentrated more on having fun with colors. The first three pieces are pendants and the fourth one is a pin. I've been having a lot of fun learning how to work with glass like this.

I made these by arranging pieces of glass on either a clear glass or a white glass backing. The small pieces were affixed with a little bit of glue, and then everything was sandwiched together with a piece of clear glass on top. After the pieces were fired in a kiln, the pendant loops or pin backings were affixed to the glass with epoxy.

dark teal and light green glass on a clear glass backing,
approximately 1.25" x 1.75"

light blue and green glass on a white glass backing,
approximately 1.25" x 1.5"

blue gray, teal, dark blue, and light green glass on a clear glass backing,
approximately 1.4" x 2"

orange, yellow, and red glass on a white glass backing,
approximately 1.25" x 1.25"

Inspirations: Vintage Books no.5

I realized it's been a while since I made an entry in the inspirations category, so I thought I would share another vintage book from my collection. This was another used book store find that came from just absentmindedly wandering around the shop. This particular children's book is called Sir Kevin of Devon, written by Adelaide Hall, illustrated by Leonard Weisgard, and published in 1963 by Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Co.

I was drawn to this book primarily for two reasons. The first was that I really liked the restricted color scheme. The second thing that caught my attention, and the main reason I bought it, is that a lot of the castle buildings in the book reminded me of the concept artwork that was done by Eyvind Earle for Disney's Sleeping Beauty film. All in all, a nice little book to add to my collection.

Commission: Castiel portrait

Two fans from Portugal commissioned me to draw a portrait of the character Castiel from the television show Supernatural. I'm not totally up to date on the show, so I'm only slightly familiar with this character, but it was still a fun commission to work on.

This was done with brown and white colored pencil on tan Canson paper, measuring 14" x 11".