the portable city

by definition, not static

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Art!

I make art!

I make things. We’re calling them art for the time being but honestly it’s mostly process and some outcomes.

You might enjoy perusing specific tags! Tags such as:
oil pastel or watercolour or gouache or digital art or sculpture

I am happiest when helping other people get excited to make things, so please drop questions and such in the comments fields and let me know what you’re hoping to make these days too!

finished work

wips

  • Working on a painting on printmaking paper

    This paper is not sized like watercolour paper and it’s sucking up all my paint! but I’m getting such soft and complex colours because of that… but I’ve lost a lot of my contrast and smaller highlights from the way the paper lets the paint spread into it like a sponge. So it’s definitely time to start bringing back some contrast with white gouache. hopefully i don’t overdo it!

    Also, I’ve been meaning to get a better work lamp for these bigger pieces. here’s a photo that better captures what it feels like working at my desk at night:

    i think i need one of those long arm florescent tube drawing lamps – anyone have a recommendation?

    any comments?

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  • working on a tiny poemzine

    as mentioned elsewhere, I’m not a huge fan of my handwriting right now, but it feels like it would be worthwhile to hand write this poem for my zine. I did a first pass and it’s all pretty rough, but I scanned it at a nice high resolution just in case I do use it.

    Maybe I’ll pick up some tomoe river paper so my fountain pen inks can really flex for this.

    any comments?

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  • tiny gouache view

    I was doing a sketch with this fountain pen, which has non-waterproof ink in it, and I decided to try washing over it with a water brush, and then painting over the tonal result with some gouache, which I haven’t done in a while. it ended up being a very enjoyable if very small painting!

    any comments?
    6 responses to “tiny gouache view”
    1. qqddllbbpp
      Reply

      what a lovely little painting

      1. Shel Kahn
        Reply

        thank you!

    2. Shel
      Reply

      Oh this is so sweet

      1. Shel Kahn
        Reply

        heck thanks!

    3. Alex Zandra
      Reply

      oh I love this!

      1. Shel Kahn
        Reply

        thanks!

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  • oil pastel bird in the hand

    painted on wood! I converted my reference photo to black and white, as well, and I think it did give me more permission to be weird with the color.

    you might not know this, but I kept pet birds from the age of 9 until I was almost 30, first a peach-faced lovebird named Pickles (i was 9, and it was a genius name) and then a series of budgies, Glacier, Uther, and Percival.

    as an adult, I know a lot more about the exotic pet bird industry, and I don’t know if owning birds is for me anymore, but if I did, I think I would go for pigeons: proper domesticated creatures that have had evolutionary time to be less stressed around people, and big enough to feel less terrifyingly vulnerable in the hand.

    but there is something extremely magical about a bird choosing to sit on your hand, and as I was flipping through unsplash looking for something to paint, I started putting together a collection of reference of just that. so maybe? there will be more of these?

    any comments?

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  • oil pastel oranges

    reffing a lovely still life from unsplash, i believe.

    done on slate blue 9 x 12″ canson mi-tients paper.

    I’ve been doing a lot of underdrawing with the cray-pas expressionist pastels, which are a lot firmer, so they don’t layer that well with themselves but they behave really predictably underneath the rest of my pastels, and are still really quite lovely as a color spread themselves. I think this might be my new go-to process!

    I might try giving this one a real glossy varnish, just to see how close I can get things to look to an oil painting. maybe doing that on paper is stupid, but worth a try!

    any comments?
    4 responses to “oil pastel oranges”
    1. Shel
      Reply

      Beautiful!

      1. Shel Kahn
        Reply

        ✌️

    2. Alex Zandra
      Reply

      oh wow that’s lovely!

      1. Shel Kahn
        Reply

        heck thanks!

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  • how to bind your thermal zine

    no answers here, folks, I’m asking!

    accordion and scroll address both honestly very cute; i suspect there’s a stapled version i could figure out too given time.

    any comments?
    4 responses to “how to bind your thermal zine”
    1. gwen
      Reply

      omg i want a scroll zine, that’s amazing

      1. Shel Kahn
        Reply

        hell yeah, thanks! can’t wait to make a bunch!

    2. Shel
      Reply

      OMG These are soooo cute!! I want a scroll zine. I feel tempted to waste a bunch of receipt paper at work to make one of these. “Oh I just accidentally printed a receipt for a weeding project oh nooooo a long receipt I’m going to keep it though”

      1. Shel Kahn
        Reply

        I HUGELY recommend making one and would def like to see it when you do!

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wips

  • thermal printer experiments

    finally got some paper rolls for my label printer and started the important process of figuring out how to make zines with it 💪

    any comments?

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  • oil pastel boat

    oil pastel pinterest study; i bought a pack of much firmer pastels and did the whole under drawing with those, and then layered the thick opaque pastels on top, and it really worked well!

    any comments?

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  • wyrmsketch

    metallic and shimmer watercolours plus fountain pen

    any comments?

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  • Oil pastel dragon riding team

    really love the colour palette i achieved here! not sure the drawing was strong enough to support it though, and the canvas was definitely too small for me at the level of precision in comfortable with right now. in the end i called this off before feeling 100% satisfied, but that’s simply the nature of exploratory work and no harm done. as i said, still very proud of this colour scheme!

    any comments?

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  • Three Pine Grosbeaks

    my latest oil pastel experiment is this painting of three pine grosbeaks, referencing a CC0 photograph shared as part of an observation on inaturalist.

    this one was created on illustration board, with a full under painting in watercolor first, which you can see in the third image. The illustration board texture has a wonderful grain and could be a very satisfying surface for oil pastel, but it tends to warp pretty dramatically when painted on with water-based media. you can see any image on the right how much it has bowed out while wet; what you can’t see is that it has an inverse warp in it once dried. clamping it down to draw on it released some but not all of it. unfortunately this means it’s just not a good solution for anything with a watercolor under painting.

    inaturalist has been a really exciting thing for me to explore, and once I discovered that you can search observations by image license I got really excited. if you’re also looking for reference, especially of specific animals, it might be a great place to start.

    any comments?

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  • oil pastel sweat bee

    I painted this one on sanded paper, the much admired pastelmat type, and found it desperately unintuitive. The grippy surface could be nice, but it’s completely unabsorbant, and i found myself unable to layer the way I’m used to on rag papers, or honestly even on wood. that said, you really can blend infinitely on this stuff, so if that’s your jam you might get more out of it than i did!

    Subject-wise this is based on my own photograph from a recent roadtrip, and it was a delight to get to zoom in on something I shot myself and try translating it into oil pastel! I’ve been playing more and more with macro lenses and extreme depth of field, and have been meaning for a while to experiment with translating that effect into paint of some kind of another.

    That said, abstracting, blurring, and softening things is both really easy to do with oil pastel and really tricky to add nuance to. I can see some places in here where the effect is really landing, and others where things feel almost into only two planes, rather than the three or more I’d like to have had throughout. So, much to learn down this path, but I’m excited to keep going with it!

    any comments?

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wips

  • mixed media test: failed haha

    i did a quick watercolour (first) and gave it a coat of fixative so i could try out layering oil pastels on top for a mixed media look (second), but I’ve hit a few challenges:

    • the oil pastels are very opaque and happily fully obscure the watercolour under them very very quickly
    • the fixative has reduced the absorbency of the paper so the pastels are staying greasy and moving around very easily, giving me wonderful nuance and also no control somehow at the same time
    • my original value plan was loose and crappy and had little contrast to speak of, not a strong place to start
    • and watercolour has, naturally, such incredibly dark values compared to oil pastels, that i can’t get them both in the same range whatsoever. i dug too deep into the darks, as it were.
    • also i had very little plan to speak of and a pretty terrible drawing, so this was maybe doomed from the start

    so likely I’ll toss this now and move on, but it has taught me a fair amount of interesting technical facts, which i plan to remember, and also reminded me of some basic truths about planning, drawing, and values, that i would like to remember but will probably ignore once again at some point in the near future.

    any comments?

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  • WIP Knight in Oil Pastel

    this is the biggest thing I’ve painted yet with the oil pastels; gonna be working in it for a while

    i was looking at digital paintings from 2022, and thinking about the method I had started using back then of having a mark making stage and a blending stage as two separate things; and the oil pastels are letting me start to approximate the same workflow, but on paper! interesting…

    any comments?

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  • Another portrait in oil pastel
    New challenge recognized: glossy black fur.
    any comments?

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  • oil pastel dog portrait!

    finished this piece of a much missed lucky boy; oil pastel on canson mi-tientes paper.

    any comments?

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  • oil pastel dog portrait in progress

    working on canson mi-tientes paper, which really let’s the pastel slide around despite the rougher side’s surface texture.

    any comments?

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  • Wolf in oil pastel

    painted on canson mi-tientes pastel paper

    any comments?
    2 responses to “Wolf in oil pastel”
    1. gwen
      Reply

      I love this

      1. Shel Kahn
        Reply

        ✨!

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