Adam Gunn

RBC Painting competition!

2011-09-23T11:41:00.000-07:00

I have not been using this blog much - I've been considering retiring it. Does anyone use blogs much anymore? Most of my favourite ones seem to have slowed down.

Since I haven't been using this blog I neglected announcing that I am a semi-finalist in this year's RBC Canadian Painting Competition. The winners will be announced at The Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton on Sept 27. I'll be heading there in a few days.

Excited!

Links!
Sort of - the actual links function doesn't seem to be working. Your days are numbered blog spot.

http://www.canadianart.ca/online/slideshows/2011/08/04/rbc_competition/index4.html

http://www.rbc.com/sponsorship/paintingcompetition/index.html

http://www.thecoast.ca/ArtAttack/archives/2011/07/21/adam-gunn-one-of-15-finalists-in-canadian-painting-competition

http://nscad.ca/en/home/abouttheuniversity/news/nscadrbc-081211.aspx

Been animating a bit again.

2011-04-26T13:45:00.000-07:00

I've been monitoring some animation labs at the school I teach at lately. The classical animation lab is a lot of fun for me - I haven't animated on paper in something like a decade. I'd forgotten how much better it feels to animate on paper. When I wasn't helping a student I used the opportunity to re-familiarize my self with classical animation. I either did exactly what the students were doing or something related.

Here's a jump with my favorite cartoon design - Stimpy. He has such a pliable form, I can't imagine a more fun character to draw.

Here's a walk cycle with a noid-like character.

This devil animation was originally animated on paper, but I scanned the drawings, and brought them into flash for clean-up. I also added a whack of extra inbetweens in flash. It was my first time working on a Cintique which makes working in flash millions of times better.

Here's a couple of stills.

Press!

2010-12-20T19:34:00.000-08:00

Heather Gillis, a journalist student at King's College, wrote a piece about me and my BMO award. It's been published at UNews - a site for university news from Halifax.

Here it is!

I Think it's Done.

2010-11-10T10:45:00.000-08:00

My painting from the BMO show recently sold to a buyer from Toronto! I've been teaching a lot lately and have been trying to fit painting in to my schedule. I've got a small space in my apartment that I've been using for a studio, but I'm thinking of moving my bed into that space and making my current bedroom my studio. I'll take some measurements today to make sure my bed will fit in there - it's quite tiny. If that works out I'll be able to make some larger paintings.

I've finished a painting I've had for a while now. I was trying to fix some patchy spots in the sky, but I changed my mind and decided to work with those spots and make the sky have a more cloudy atmosphere. I think this helps the painting feel more ominous. I tried to suggest that the main light source was not natural by tinting it slightly yellow. I also worked on the hill and made the top of the hill fit with the painterly manner of the figures on top better, and then I tried to smooth the transition from that painterly top to the smoother bottom of the hill.

I added a lot more colour into the hill. I added more flowers in at the top and painted more colours into the shadows and highlights on the hill. I think the added colour helps to balance the overall colour of the painting, and helps to lead the eye from the teeth creature, to the musicians on top of the hill, and back down to the child's face. I hope the punched-up colour also offsets the ominous mood of the setting and helps the painting be even more weird and unsettling.

I'm the 2010 BMO 1st Art! Nova Scotia winner!

2010-09-27T10:12:00.000-07:00

BMO Financial Group's 1st Art! Invitational Student Art Competition celebrates the creativity of art students from post-secondary institutions across Canada. Deans and instructors of undergraduate certificate, diploma, and degree programs in visual art are invited to select from their graduating classes three students, whose ability and imagination place them 1st among their peers. A distinguished selection committee chooses a national winner and one winner from each eligible province and territory.

The national winner receives $5,000 and the regional winners each receive $2,500 for his or her artwork. The national winner’s work will become part of BMO’s corporate art collection, which includes historical and contemporary Canadian masters such as Kenojuak Ashevak, Emily Carr, Paterson Ewen, Tom Forestall, Marc-Aurèle Fortin, Lawren Harris, Thaddeus Holownia, David Milne, Margaret Priest, Denyse Thomasos, Ian Wallace and others. All winning entries will be on display at the 1st Art! 2010 exhibition, held at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in October 2010.

I've been meaning to make a post about this for a while now - I actually found out I'd won back in early July. I was really exited when I won- it felt like someone had given me a shot in the arm! My winning entry was my painting "The Myth of Silliness."

There's been a bit of press about it in a few places:
Recently in the Metro-

A few month's ago on the NSCAD website

You can also see painting on the BMO 1st Art! website

My painting will be displayed along with the winning artworks at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto from Oct 6, 2010 - 0ct 31, 2010. The MOCCA is at 952 Queen Street West Toronto, Ontario and you can visit there Tuesday - Sunday 11 - 6 PM. BMO is paying to fly the winners in for the opening on Oct 4th and 5th. Can't wait to go!

Coast Cover

2010-08-20T15:32:00.000-07:00

Sue Carter from The Coast contacted me a few weeks ago about doing a cover illustration for an issue about Halifax style. It was a fun job to work on and the people at The Coast were great to deal with.

The Coast's art director Moon Hee Nam gave me a description of what they wanted the illustration to be and sent some photos to use as examples of certain styles of clothing they were looking for. They wanted the illustration to reference the cover for The Yuppie Handbook.

Here's the rough drawing I came up with above. Below is the final illustration painted in photoshop. I hadn't used photoshop in a really long time for much else than simple photo touch ups. All the painting I've been doing really changed the way I approached this - I pretty much just tried to think of it as a painting - but of course photoshop has the added benefit of letting you work in layers. Whoever it was who finished off the final cover did a nice job matching the type colour to the Illustration colours.

While trying to make a jpg of this illustration for this post I accidentally made this weird image below

I don't know how that happened, but I think it looks neat. Below is a version with different colour.

I love making these odd colour versions. I think we should all start painting our exposed skin turquoise and dressing in hot pinks, blues, and purples - That should be the new Halifax look.

Figure painting from last year

2010-07-11T13:05:00.000-07:00

This was painted last year in my figure painting class. I like it better now than I did last year. Below is a study I did for it - it ended up being very different in the final painting.

I think the painting looks great in this image where I shifted the colours towards red in photoshop.

From the vault

2010-07-02T18:02:00.001-07:00

This is a self portrait I did a while ago for intro paint at NSCAD. I couldn't stand to look at it before because the face is so warped- the forehead and lower face are on different planes. I like it better now though after more than a year and a half.

Altering Colour In Photoshop

2010-06-01T16:57:00.000-07:00

I was just playing around in photoshop with photos of my paintings. I think I like the vacuum tube painting better in these colours. It'd be neat to get large prints of these made.

Also, in other news- my painting of a janitor recently sold!

New painting

2010-05-09T12:57:00.000-07:00

Untitled
35X44"
oil on wood panel

Detail

This was the last painting I did for studio class. I had two weeks left and set myself a goal of finishing a painting in that time. I'm pretty happy with this one, although its not strictly finished yet - I want to fix a few areas in it.

The Myth of Silliness

2010-05-09T12:22:00.000-07:00

The Myth of Silliness
32X33&1/2 "
oil on wood panel

Detail

This was painted this winter in my studio class at NSCAD. It took quite a bit of time to finish - I spent almost a month just building the still life set up. The figures were assembled from various objects I collected from flea markets, dollar stores, ect. Then the painting itself took about another two months.

I think the hyper realism of the painting contrasts nicely with the whimsical and ridiculous nature of the objects. I also think there's something going on in this painting with ideas of the natural and the artificial.

Alex Livingston was my studio advisor for this last semester and he gave me some great advise and encouragement - he also took these photos posted above. Thanks Alex!

Paintings from last fall

2010-05-09T11:46:00.000-07:00

The Vagabond
15x20"
oil on wood panel

Rowing Home
20X15"
oil on wood panel

These are two paintings from a series of four.

Independent Intermediate Painting Project

2010-02-05T15:06:00.000-08:00

The idea with these paintings was to reproduce classic animation backgrounds and then place unexpected objects into there spaces. I picked my reference images from a blog authored by Rob Richards called Animation Backgrounds. Rob has a real passion for animation backgrounds and cells, especially classic Disney artwork. He recreates the backgrounds with frame grabs and then fixes them in photoshop to remove the animation drawings and show just the background painting. I find these backgrounds are interesting spaces, because they are left open to be used like stages for action to happen within. They're also just plane beautifully painted and skillfully composed.

I chose a whole a bunch of paintings that I wanted to use, but I only had time to reproduce two- as they took much longer than I expected to paint. The first painting at the top of this post uses a background from a Donald Duck short that I think was titled Grand Canyon. The second painting uses a background from Lady and the Tramp. They were a real challenge to paint in oil; I'm not sure what the original mediums were- I think acrylic for the Grand Canyon background and water colour for the Lady and the Tramp one. Both of these paintings were painted on wood panel; The fist one is 18"X60" and the second 18"X48".

The objects in top painting are vacuum tubes and a blob fish. Why? Absurdity- thats why. The blob fish was painted from a photo I found on the net; The expression on the fish makes me feel so guilty and I thought it would be funny to stick him on the edge of the cliff in this painting. The tubes and fish are all painted on celluloid that's been glued to the surface of the painting, and the edges of the celluloid are cut into shapes that hide the edges. You can't really tell that there's any plastic on the painting unless you get very close or happen to catch some reflected light off the surface. The celluloid is a reference to the cell animation process that the background paintings were originally used for.

The second Painting has another vacuum tube in the front where In the original background there was a fire hydrant; They were similar shapes so I couldn't resist changing it. The fish is half tube and half barreleye fish, which is a deep sea fish recently discovered that has a transparent forehead, which it apparently can look through by rotating it's eyes backwards. The tube-barrelfish is painted on celluloid that covers about 3/4 of the paintings surface. This painting is impossible to photograph because of the reflections off the celluloid and the darkness of the painting itself- this was the best picture I could get.

I've updated a few of my lasts posts of paintings with some better photo documentation.

here's the address for Rob's animation backgrounds blog

http://animationbackgrounds.blogspot.com/

Depth Painting

2010-01-01T12:15:00.001-08:00

This painting was for an assignment in Mathew Reichertz's intermediate painting class. He gave us a presentation on traditional depth cues and then explained some of his own additional ideas about further depth cues. I tried to fit all of them in. A lot of them worked, some didn't.

I used vacuum tubes as a subject again, but these ones were painted without any reference. This painting is 5X6 feet by the way.

More drawings of people without clothes

2009-11-25T16:14:00.000-08:00

Figure Painting!

2009-11-20T16:58:00.000-08:00

This oil painting is 4X5 feet, one of the largest anything I've ever made. It was for my Intermediate painting class and was finished about a week ago. The model's name is Peter.

We worked on it for four classes. The first class was used just to draw and plan the painting out.

Then I gridded that drawing and transferred it to the large canvas.

Next I painted in the background and put in a few tones for the figure.

Then next class the model returned, and I filled in most of the dark tones on the figure.

I forgot my camera for the 3rd day of painting, where I mostly filled more of the light tones. The 4th day was used to polish up some of the unfinished looking parts and add some good suggestions from my painting instructor Mathew Reichertz. I'm very happy with how it came out. My favorite part is the left arm resting on his leg, holding the mop.

The head's pretty nice to.

Painting large is a nice experience, but now I gotta find somewhere to put this huge thing. For now it's up high on the wall in the painting studio.

Expanded painting project

2009-11-04T15:31:00.001-08:00

This was for a recent expanded painting project for the Intermediate Painting course I'm taking at NSCAD. My idea was to arrange some old broken vaccum tubes I had (these ones were pulled out of an old tube organ) into a pleasing pattern and mount them on to wood panels, but to have some of them painted and some of them real. Ideally,if they were painted right, from a distance you wouldn't be able to tell which were real and which were painted. I think they turned out pretty good. The illusion only really works on the wall of my studio space because I had to paint the shadows to specifically match the lighting in that area.
The panel on the far left is a cross section type diagram of one of the larger tubes. If you read the text you might see that it's not all that accurate or serious. Part of the inspiration for this painting was Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs. I don't like Kosuth's art, its too conceptual and lacks both skill and appeal, but the concept of separating and displaying the different ways in which we understand objects is interesting.

Some other views of the paintings

Time for another painting

2009-08-06T15:35:00.000-07:00

I painted this still life last year, and just dug it our recently. I think it was one of my first colour paintings in acrylic. I really like cool colours, especially greyed cool colours, they make a painting feel thick and real.

Soapy and Scrubbed

2009-06-07T11:03:00.000-07:00

Billions and billions,
are either idle or poor, I was told.
Her prosperity keeps in touch with uncles.
Much of her wealth, its huge expanses of moors and bog,
looks so soapy and scrubbed.
Fossils prove the Redwood's great age,
deeply romantic, as they dominate for decades.

Pontormo Anatomy Assignment

2009-05-07T10:19:00.000-07:00

I drew this back in February. I worked from The Deposition from the Cross by Jacopo da Pontormo, and photos of our anatomy class posed like the figures in the same painting.

More Recent Life Drawings

2009-05-01T11:38:00.000-07:00

Final advanced anatomy project 2009!

2009-04-23T14:54:00.000-07:00

This was a fun project to work on. I went through all my life drawings from this winter's semester and made a selection of poses from individual models. I redrew all the selected drawings into one space using the original life drawings as reference. This must be how painting and drawing masters had to work to put together large scenes of interacting figures. I tried to relate each figure to another with eye contact and the positioning of each figure's pose in the relation to the others. I think the relations give the drawing a narrative. It was satisfying to work only from my own drawings and observations.

Below are some of the life drawings I worked from;

PAINTINGS!

2008-12-31T14:03:00.000-08:00

These are my favorite still life paintings I did for intro painting. I'm really enjoying painting, especially the colour aspect of it. Mixing colours to match what I'm seeing, starts to become almost a meditative activity. It's a whole new dimension.

Almost Recent Paintings

2008-11-17T19:18:00.000-08:00

Here's a few still life paintings from my into painting class. Both are in acrylic. The first one's a low intensity colour study, and the second one is a high intensity study. More to come, when I can borrow my roommates camera.

Back in school

2008-10-12T17:50:00.000-07:00

I'm back in school full time now, doing all kinds of fine artsy things. These were done during class time with a model in my narrative class over two days. We had an hour for each pose and we were to improvise and create a composition as we drew. It was pretty open as to how we did this, I approached mine with a more formal composition. In improvising a drawing we got to see how a narrative starts to suggest itself. The mind starts to make up stories to explain the relationships of the figures in the drawing. I liked drawing these, and I'd like to do some more.

George Liquor ink tests

2008-07-26T13:07:00.000-07:00

These are inks I did of some layout drawings off John Kricfalusi's blog. They were both inked directly in flash, but I think he has his inkers do there work in Illustrator. I may have to try Illustrator out because newer versions of flash have difficulty handling lines with more than one corner or twist.

my email is adam-gunn@hotmail.com

Flash clean up

2008-06-01T14:43:00.001-07:00

I did clean up for this project in flash. The entire animation from posing and roughs to finished clean up was done in flash 8 professional. I think it's a good example showing that flash can be used to make good quality animation. I think the only limits that keep quality animation from being done in flash are the same limits you get with traditional animation; skill, effort and time. Flash just makes it much easier to cheat for the less skilled and more tempting to cheat for those who are skilled. Not that all animation cheating is bad, but I think it could be done more tastefully.

I posted two versions of this animation, because I was unhappy with the compromises in quality you get when posting video on the internet. The first one is an swf and shows the line quality better. The other is a quicktime on u-tube and shows the motion better.

The rough animation was executed with finesse by the talented Rachel Morrison, and the handsome character design is by Luke Conrad, who owns the company (Cartoon Conrad Productions Inc.) we did this for.

A scene I animated for a music video a while ago

2008-06-01T14:41:00.000-07:00

Here's a video with the whole scene before clean up.

Here's just the main characters from the scene.

Here's some of the funnier characters in the back ground of this scene.

This was part of a video for a song called "Work On You" by MSTRKRFT. All the animation was done directly in Flash 4. The posing and charater designs are by Derek Jessome. It was a real challenge to animate these characters, because of their detail and complicated solid anatomy. Each frame for each character was very time consuming to draw, but because they were animated in cycles it was more manageable. I animated all their dancing cycles on three's not only to save time, but because it actually looks better when there's this much detail on the characters. I only used symbols for the heads, everything else is drawn. The main female character was animated with a 11 frame cycle, its's mostly on three's except one frame which is 1 frame before the next and another is only held for two frames to give her pelvis a bit of a kick. The main male character was animated with a 23 frame cycle but it's all on three's and just uses 5 drawings cycled in and out. The back ground characters were kept to 11 frame cycles on three's and only used 3 drawings.

George Liquor gets inked while administering discipline/love.

2008-05-04T11:14:00.000-07:00

Here's an ink test I did in flash of a George Liquor pencil drawing from John Kricfalusi's blog. I'm a big fan of his cartoons and his blog.

I usually work as a rough animator, but I've been hired a few times to ink animation that needed special care. I cleaned up some intros for a show called Olliver's Adventures, and I'm working on something right now for a project that needs to look as close to classical animation as it can. I'm strongly considering clean up as a career. It would be nice to work as a freelance ink artist and to be able to just pick work that looked fun.

Kirk Douglas is my final project!

2008-04-08T08:53:00.000-07:00

The anatomy class is all finished now. We had our last class yesterday where everyone brought in their final assignment. We could do anything we wanted for this as long as it was anatomy related.
The day when we were studying face and head anatomy I had a weird experience where all day I was seeing faces as if I was an alien who didn't know what a face was. Wedges sticking out from craniums. This made every face more interesting to look at. I believe that when you think you know what your looking at you don't see as much. The studying of anatomy changes how you look at the human figure because you know more about the under structure of the surface that you see, but I found that it also made me more aware of the workings of a supreme design in the body that is absolutely beond the comprehension of the mind.
Anyway, on the that day when I was seeing faces differently, I watched the movie 20 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Kirk Douglas's face knocked me out. It was the weirdest of all the weird faces I'd seen that day. I started renting lots of Kirk Douglas movies and collecting screen captures of Kirk Douglas. Spartacus, Paths of Glory, Detective Story, Ace in the Hole, War Wagon, Lust for Life and Out of the Past. I picked the shots that had the best lighting and showed the form of his face the clearest. I'd wanted to also do some drawings from stills with some of his weird and extreme facial expressions but maybe another time. I found out while drawing that his face has a strange symmetry that is exaggerated by lines that appear down the center of his face. He has a permanent crease between his brows that runs down his nose subtly. Hid forehead also indents slightly in the middle and he has that well known hole in his chin. His face is very angular as well which my anatomy teacher pointed out could be because of the way he works out his face for his wild expressions, heavy lifting for the face. When I pointed some of this out several people remarked how it was like his face had been cleaved in two by an axe or sword right down the center. It reminds me of what you get when you draw half a face and use a computer to mirror the other half.

Parts of dead people

2008-04-02T16:29:00.001-07:00

This Monday for anatomy class we went to the medical lab at Dalhousie. First we visited a room that was more of a museum with permanent items on display for study. There was some pretty freaky stuff there like babies in jars and faces sitting on shelves. All these things were real but had been treated very extensively somehow. I picked a hand to draw. The hand was very dry but still somewhat flexible.
After that we put on lab coats and blue rubber gloves and went into another room. In This next room there were many metal tables with body parts or whole bodies wrapped up in fabric and plastic. We went around and unwrapped the body parts. Every table had something different. One table had a forearm with most of the tissue removed except for a few ligaments and muscles. There were legs on other tables, a foot, a pelvis, a torso and one whole body. I chose to draw from a table with a half ribcage and attached arm. The ribcage had been cut down the center of the spine and cut at the neck. All the skin,fatty tissue and veins had been removed. I was surprised that we were allowed to touch and manipulate the specimens. All the blood had been drained from the tissue and replaced with some kind of sanitized fluid, but the tissues were very moist and flexible. It was very strange at first to be handling a severed piece of someone's body but I got use to it pretty fast and soon it was just another thing to draw. The smell was just like the smell when I dissected a fetal pig in biology class in high school. Nobody puked and I think some of us even got bored after a while.
It was a pretty surreal experience.

knees

2008-03-18T08:36:00.000-07:00

Some life drawing. We were looking at knee joints and lower leg muscles in class yesterday. Calve muscles are good looking muscles.

Pelvis bones

2008-03-13T10:54:00.000-07:00

More anatomy. Anterior (front) and posterior (back) views of the lumbar vertebrae (last 5 bones of your spine), the sacrum (that thing in the middle of your pelvis with your tailbone), and innominate bones (hip bones).

Me self

2008-03-03T12:10:00.001-08:00

Yet another anatomy assignment. For this we were supposed to draw a self portrait with an expression where we could demonstrate three facial muscles. I took a photo that I used for reference. Ever try to hold an expression for 6 hours?

I haven't been looking at faces the same way since we went over the bones and muscles of the face in class last week. I keep seeing weird complicated rigging wedges jutting out from peoples craniums.

life drawing

2008-02-27T06:58:00.000-08:00

This was a 10 minute pose I drew Monday morning in class. I was up late drawing 2 nights in a row and I'd been drawing for three days strait to get all my assignments done, so I think I was in a drawing zone in class. I was so tired, all I wanted was sleep.

Facial Construction

2008-02-26T09:34:00.000-08:00

This was another anatomy assignment where I had to make a self portrait. I decided to do only the construction forms. I like it but some of the facial features feel a little askew to me. I did this between midnight and 2 in the morning Sunday night. I look creepy.

Skulls

2008-02-25T13:04:00.000-08:00

Another anatomy assignment.

50 hands!

2008-02-23T19:34:00.000-08:00

This was my latest assignment for anatomy class. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life drawing hands.

Crystal Ball

2008-02-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

This is another drawing from a newspaper photo. What does he see in his crystal ball? Should he invest in corn? tea? toilet paper?

Buddy The Guy

2008-02-18T11:41:00.000-08:00

Here's a sketch of Buddy Guy.

Frenchy McPresident

2008-02-16T07:58:00.000-08:00

Heres a supper time sketch I did at Cousins yesterday. This was drawn from a newspaper picture of French President Nicolas Starkozy. I like to draw from pictures where people make expressions that really use the meat on their face. Ears are fun to.

Four Forearms

2008-02-15T13:43:00.000-08:00

I've been taking an anatomy class at NSCAD. This was for last weeks assignment on forearms. I've been practicing some guitar exercises a lot lately and they can really make your forearm burn, so I thought of Eddie Van Halen when I thought of forearms. These drawings were all referenced from various photos of Eddie in magazines and books. Thanks to Derek for lending me the book "Van Halen: a Visual History."

David Mackeigan

2008-02-14T10:41:00.000-08:00

I do a lot of drawings from newspapers and here's one of them. This fella murdered his girlfriend and tried to cover it up by burning her body. Oh and happy Valentines day!

The Beatles

2008-02-13T07:16:00.000-08:00

I gotta get this damn blog started, so here's a drawing I did of the Beatles for a Christmas gift.

I FEEL BLOGGY

2007-01-25T13:49:00.000-08:00

I have a blog!