Mike & Mike...and Mike

Birthdays are great, aren't they? You get to celebrate a day with your friends and go out with a free pass. It's like a personal new year for only you; unless you share a birthday with someone you know (....Diana!, But this isn't about me), and most of all gifts!! This gift story is about a good friend of mine named Mike..no, I am not speaking in the third person either. This is another Mike.

Yesterday we celebrated Mike's birthday, and because of this occasion, I decided to create something instead giving a gift card, or buying dinner. I'm not saying that these are bad gifts, they are actually great. I'm also not saying I'm cheap, since
the materials I use to create something are not cheap. I'm just saying it's different... and I hate shopping.

This is Mike:

And this is a picture from a film he made entitled "West Texas Murder", it's also his Facebook profile picture, so BAM! idea!!......createdwhileatwork....

I decided to sketch out something. I'm not an artist, I just like to play one on TV. I also have a horrible memory, so at any given moment you will find me with a pocket full of sticky notes, and words like "milk", "cookies", and "fucking cat litter" written on my hand in sharpee.

The horrible sketch:

The sticky note would have acted as a cheap birthday card attached to the actual item I was going to create, but as with any TV artist, it was in the trash bin as soon as I got home. It had served its purpose of reminding me to make something later.

Now onto the real work... Since the image was taken from a facebook thumbnail image, it was simply too small for my project, so I had to blow it up. This of course caused it to lose quality. I then had to vector the image in photoshop to get the shapes I needed for the next step. (What the hell is Vector Graphics)?

The Vectored Shapes:
Ok, So now that that's done it's time to print. The final image will be placed on a 16"x20" canvas, so to fit this I must print each shape (3 total) to 12 pages total (4 pages each image) This is getting kind of big now.

After I print the pages, I see that the flimsy paper will not be good enough for the painting I'll be doing, so I go out and buy some thicker poster board instead. I lay out all the shapes, and commence cutting the negatives out...ugh



After all the shapes are cut is the fun part; painting! At first I failed by using acrylic on the canvas. This bled through the paper because I didn't use a sponge or dry brush to apply it, but then I thought, "what's more fun than acrylic paint? Spray Paint!!" So with my stencils in hand...

After the paintin--...er, Spraying is done, I am left with this:

So, did he like it..?


Well, at first I thought he was sad..

But it turns out he was just putting on a face (ba-dum), He did end up liking it, so in the end it was a success!


-Mikol






Hear no evil, See no evil, Sneeze no evil?