Big Fucking Julian--start to (almost) finish

This is the rough chronology of Big Fucking Julian...

Start with gray...



Then a smaller, secondary grid in black...



Realization that we're completely screwed leads to the abandonment of the grid; leads to this:



Well and good, but I'm not liking the glasses, or the eyes...



Which shows you that we do sometimes use a brush. I then repaint the eyes...



Which gives us a Lone Ranger kind of a thing. Then, moving forward we get to this...



Which, for the record, is supposed to look like this:



But back to the matter at hand. When I started out, I wanted to replicate the feel of "Close, But No Cigar," which is this:



Obviously that ship has sailed. Nonetheless, with the intention of doing two Big Julians (the second one to be titled "BFJ 2" for the show, with BFJ 2 destined to look like "Close, But Not Quite," (which is, of course, this):



I thought I'd try to stick with the rough, sketchy feel against the white background.



So I'm feeling okay. All that's left is to stare, in a self-loathing way, perhaps armed with a shot of cheap bourbon, at what you see here for about a day, then tinker a little bit, then scrawl the title across the top and sign the lower right.

I will, however, say this: When I painted the orange lenses I literally painted over top of the eyes (which had been executed primarily in a kind of puke-green). And even though I've already noodled a bit with them, I'm going to be thinking about how to make the eyes pop just a bit more while still retaining the feel of looking through colored lenses.

Interestingly enough, if you scroll up to image #3--the first execution of the eyes and the lenses--they actually come across better. That's because I painted the orange lenses in around the existing eyes, rather than over them.

The urge is to write "Lesson learned", except that I'm one of those people who appears to be congenitally incapable of learning from my mistakes. But that's another post.