So I finished four houses in five weeks, instead of six houses in six weeks. This was largely because my son started going to daycare and we got a virus that he got. We’ve been referring to it as the plague- it took four weeks to fully boot it out of the system and our son Kraken’s still struggling a little bit.

Above is house #3, which I liked. It was a ton of fun to make an overgrown house again, something I’ve tried a couple of times and was nervous at first to work on. I was able to make curved wood textures by slowly strip slicing cedar wood shingles with a broken kitchen knife. It’s a technique I can use now- I’ve been trying to learn definite “brushstroke” techniques with my wood. Since my wood often operates in a brushstroke sort of way, I think it’s helpful to expand my repetoire.

I’d like to get a fully functional kitchen knife at some point. Get fancy down in the basement with my knife techniques.

I’m really proud of this one. I wanted to use the same colors, but do a strong texture contrast. I drew this one so I could get good perspective and I am especially happy with the shading on the left side of the building. It’s the best overgrown house I’ve done, and the most seamless combination of wood chunks, wood strips, and caulking. After building it, I think it only took and hour and fifteen minutes to paint (for a total of six something hours).

I’m planning on doing four more, and having a progression of houses at the unsmoke show in two years. I hope I can make enough paintings- It’s been driving me pretty hard since I got the show. The thing is that I’d like to have all five star paintings- like, I’ll try to keep the sub par ones straight out. Unfortunately, it takes a while to warm up into a genre. Like, the first three houses were good, but the fourth house is definitely a cut above. It’s hard to make paintings that are that good consistently, even trying as hard as I can (like I am right now).

Creativity is always sort of hit and miss. I think that if I get the time, I’m going to make a superabundance of paintings, and then carve them down to the best ones for the show.