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I had tons of fun painting this one. It’s small, but lickable. I think art should have a high lickability quotient.

Do you oh-my-gawd-NEED this painting? Cool.

I’ve been customizing things with original art since I could pick up a marker. Individualizing your stuff by making it look totally cool is something humans have a natural tendency to do. We add stickers to our laptops, carry around rad keychains, and put decals in our car windows. The alternative is to mark our stuff by peeing on it like a dog, but my personal preference is paint, stickers and marker.

Typically I come up with my own designs for commissioned pieces, but in this case they gave me a very specific sketch to work from and even dictated the colors they wanted. It turned out completely awesome!

Using the customer’s design as a reference, it looks pretty terrible at this stage. Don’t worry, it will get better.

See? It’s shaping up. On to color!

Mostly colored. I added some embellishments that make it uniquely Sparky, like the darker-toned strokes in the wings.

You can see where I need to re-ink the lines in black. This also lets me clean up my coloring and shape things. It’s almost like sculpture.

Done! After this I coat it with a polyurethane lacquer that will keep it all from washing or rubbing off.

Now I just need to finish assembling the trucks and wheels and this longboard is ready to cruise. Next up, I am taking an old and battered box fan and making it better than new. Stay tuned!

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Sometimes I look back at a piece of artwork and I can’t retrace my steps. Where did that line come from? Why did I choose that color? Why a heart?

I think the art I’ve done that I like best is the art where I can’t retrace those steps. It’s art I’ve created where it feels like I dreamed it all. Which I suppose is at least sort of true.

Love Bird on Wood

Same art box I’ve used since 1990.

If you’ve been hanging around here for a while, you probably know that I create a lot of digital art. You may not know that I didn’t start my art career as a digital artist. Nope. In fact, I am from that very long ago Once Upon a Time time where art schools did not even teach digital art. My school, the American Academy of Art only had one little Macintosh (what we called them back in prehistoric times), tucked away in a closet. Only advanced students were allowed to touch it [HAND SLAP]. Which was fine by me, because my computer knowledge at that time was limited to writing “go to” commands in BASIC. Adobe Illustrator (88) was still an infant.

So I did what I’ve always done, which is to create art using my hands, pencils, watercolors, ink, paper, glue and whatever I could find laying around. It was much later in my career that I started using a computer to create graphic design, and then animation for Nickelodeon. Which is amazing, because I feel that my experiences in crafting mixed media art from real world materials, sketching and painting helped me be more creative with my digital tools.

I still do a lot of digital work, but these days, more than ever, I like to get my hands messy by painting on wood.

Here’s a piece I’m just completing on a skateboard:

I like to use paint pens and Sharpies. This one in particular I did freehand, without an idea in my head of what it would be. Sometimes I just go with the flow to see what happens.

Other times, I’ll pick up a piece of wood and try to figure out what it wants to be before I start decorating. Like this chunk of 2′ x 4′ that I had laying around:

I’m trying to figure out what it wants to be. Which sounds like a lot of New Age bullshit, but really, it…

…nope. It does. It just sounds like New Age bullshit. Anyway, what I’m doing is scanning the wood and trying not to think about bills, pets, kids, my broken windshield wiper, bills, what’s for dinner, bills, or why my shoe keeps coming untied.

After I cleared my mind (more bullshit, that never happens), I flipped this puppy over and saw…

… a whale!

Here’s where I stop blogging about it and get to work. If you want to see the finished piece, follow Sparky Firepants on twitter or instagram. You can also see it in our Sparky Firepants Etsy shop, among our other specially special painted pieces.

Questions? Comments? Let ‘em rip!