Chuck Jones Auction Painting Revealed - eBay Detai

UPDATE 2: I've posted one of the "practice" paintings I did for the charity auction over on the eBay. Bidding starts at ten bucks, and if the winning bid is $100 or more, the buyer gets a FREE color sketch card of any Looney Tunes character they choose!

UPDATE: Just got word that my piece was one of the "favorites" at the auction and sold for $300! So happy to have been asked to participate and help out the center in some small way.

In an earlier post, I announced that I'd been asked to contribute a piece of artwork to the upcoming "Red Dot Auction", a Chuck Jones Center for Creativity fund-raising event. That was exactly two months ago, and since the event is happening as I write this, I can finally talk about (and show) my actual piece.

Naturally, being asked to participate in this is a huge deal. Being born in the 70's, Saturday morning cartoons were a lifestyle for a kid, especially one that wanted to be an artist. Even after I'd seen them all a hundred times, I'd still sit in front of our big console TV with a bowl of cereal watching the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show. Once I was old enough to realize cartoons were actually drawn by people, Chuck Jones became one of my heroes. He still is.



Once the excitement wore off, the panic set in. Sheer, unadulterated terror. What was I going to do? What characters should I draw? What if I screw it up? Worse still, I hadn't actually painted anything since high school. We're talking 21 years, folks.

I gave a lot of thought to what I'd do, and while there was certainly no requirement to use Looney Tunes characters, I felt it was only appropriate, given it had Chuck's name on it. I definitely have my favorite cartoons. Duck Amuck, Barber of Seville and What's Opera Doc? spring to mind. But I've always loved Robin Hood Daffy. To this day, I still have to chuckle at Porky's uncontrollable laughter. Seemed like a good subject for my painting.

I got my 10"x10" stretched canvas in the mail, but I wasn't ready to commit paint to it yet. So I made a trip to my favorite art store and got some supplies. Again, I haven't painted in ages, so I had to buy all new stuff. Got an assortment of decent brushes, about a dozen tubes of gouache paint and a few other miscellaneous things. I also bought two more 10" canvases to practice on (ruin) to get a feel for the paints. I'd always used oils before, but I've been wanting to use gouache for a while on my sketch cards, so it seemed like a good time to learn them.

After a bunch of photo research, I penciled out the whole drawing on paper, then scanned into Photoshop. From there, I bumped up the levels so that all the lines were extra thick and black. Then I printed that out to make my tracing image.



My drafting table has a glass top, and I have a flexible lamp mounted underneath it to simulate a large light box. I took the print and placed it underneath the canvas and used the light to trace the drawing lightly in pencil. My first pass at the painting was quite a learning experience. Even though gouache is a watercolor, it's an opaque watercolor and went on a lot thicker than I'd anticipated. That said, the painting came out pretty well, all things considered.

So before I did my second painting, I read up on gouache a bit more and went through some tutorial videos. My mistake was not watering the paints down more. You can really lighten them up quite a bit, and they can be re-wetted and re-worked after they're on the canvas. I did the painting for the second time, and felt like I was getting comfortable with the medium. But oddly, I kinda thought my first version was better.



Now it was go time. I was down to the "official" canvas. On this third try, everything seemed to go right. I was getting the hang of the paints and wasn't as dark as the first two. I really wanted to emulate the look of a Looney Tunes background, so I didn't want the colors too saturated.

Then came time to ink all the lines. On the first two paintings, I'd done this with a black brush pen. But for some reason, I felt confident enough to try inking this one with an actual brush. Maybe it was because I had a really good brush, but it went great. I'm definitely going to do more inking with a brush, maybe even on my new comic (more about that soon).



Once I felt like it was done, I made sure it was dry and repacked it for pick-up. I could only sign the back, as bidders won't know who the artist is until they've bought the painting. For good measure, I also included one of my sketch cards with a penciled Bugs Bunny as a thank-you to whomever buys it. By the time I post this, the auction will be over, but I may not yet know if my painting even sold, much less for how much. I'll post an update when I know more.



At any rate, while there was a lot of stress involved, I'm so glad I had the opportunity to do this. Sometimes there's nothing like a project with a real deadline to get you motivated and trying new things. I'm now wanting to do more with paints, and I definitely will be doing more brush inking.

And by the way, if there's any interest, I may put one or both of my "practice" canvases up for sale. Will post an update on that as well.

Also, if you want to see all the other submissions to the auction, they're listed here.