Helicopter Ben--The movie

It's actually not a movie, but if you grab your scroll bar and move the images up and down while blinking in a coordinated manner, it can be like a movie...

This is the first shot I took with color on the canvas.



It evolved into this:



Is it my imagination, or is his left nostril migrating towards the right side of the canvas? Too much more of this and we're in Picasso-land.

This, I think, is where we last saw things:



I have just uncorked my big tube of titanium white and had my way directly with the canvas.

Then came this:



And this:



Quick note. I rode my bike to work this morning (I love that phrase "to work." Almost enough to fool the casual TYOMP reader into thinking my life and routines were normal, if that's the right word.). I painted the earlier images then went for a ride in Prospect Park. About halfway around the park all I could think about was little pale blue dots. You can see them above. In execution I might have preferred a paler dot, but hey, what do you do?

And then this:



You can see that one of the things I did here was take a brush of gesso to the background of the thing, obliterating, to a degree, stray drips and drops plus the pencil lines that had originally been part of the four by five foot grid.

I then took my brush to his left nostril and obliterated that as well. If you scroll back up and examine the prior images closely you will have to agree that the nose was a disaster.

And then, finally, this:



I finally knuckled under and pulled out the yellow. I've since toned it down, but this is the last shot I took. That said, at this exact point, both the yellow and the green are a bit of a jolt. That said, the green is not the problem. The whole bottom half of the image is chock full of green. It's the yellow smeared over top of the green that has created this particular bit of nastiness. I would advise you to remain calm.

And, for you completists, consider this pairing:





Very cool, doing the scroll up/down while blinking thing with these.

Me? I think it's going well. The challenge now is multifold. As it always is. But I people to ejaculate words like "Whoa, Nelly," or things to that effect, when they see the hand I've wrought. And so far, it's a bit boring.