CrashOctopus Blog

Coulton Squid by Meg Lyman

5×7″ gouache on paper

At a recent convention, I was commissioned to create a Jonathan Coulton squid by a fan of his. He’s a cool musician guy who writes fun songs… and some are about cephalopods. How cool is that?

This is one of those commissions I really enjoyed. I love when people ask for cephalopod-related things, because it indicates that I am becoming known for them, but also because I love painting them.

For those artists out there who take commissions, what are your favorite subjects?

It’s love… strange love, but love.

Gouache on watercolor paper, 8×10″

Drag Queen by Meg Lyman

5×5″, colored pencil

Sorry I’ve been quiet this week. I knocked my head on the ground at softball and have been sleepy and achy ever since. But here! Have a cross-dressing cuttlefish!

Did you know? Some small male cuttlefishes wear “girl” colors to sneak past the big male guarding his mate and do her before anyone realizes what’s going on.

Sneaky.

Nautilus macromphalus by Meg Lyman

11×14″ gouache on Pastelbord

$225 - e-mail to buy

I am beginning to think I set unrealistic goals at the beginning of the year. I underestimated the amount of time required for things like, say, putting my house on the market. It has been hugely time-consuming. However, having that list of goals has helped keep me motivated during the long, full days, even if I’m not perfectly on track to finish everything.

N. macromphalis WIP 1: Background. See this post for my laments about Pastelbord, the Magical Brush Eater. The cheap synthetic brush I used to complete the painting held up surprisingly well.

Here are the goals and my 1st Quarter commentary.

• Register my business by March - Done. I want to frame the certificate.
• Redo this blog to greatly expand its content and interactivity - Not done. I had hoped to finish this by now, but… yeah. Still in the works, and I’ve actually done some coding.
• Trim my website into a portfolio - See above, re: coding.
  
• Time all my projects with the new stopwatch Santa got for me - Doing. Doesn’t work nearly as well when I have 5 projects going at once…
• Complete the 100 Cephalopods project - No way is this going to happen. I have a grand total of 2 done. Commissions got in the way. Working for dollars is way better than working on spec, though, so I’m not bummed about missing this one.
• Promote my art on MySpace, etc. - Slowly working on that. Check out my MySpace page if you’re into that sort of thing.
• Do 10 shows and/or conventions - Going to happen! I have done four already and the rest are planned out.

N. macromphalus WIP 2: Whites. I didn’t do much planning for this piece. For example, I hadn’t planned to push the boundaries of color. These are all supposed to be shades of white, but at this stage I kept thinking, “Looks like metal. Maybe I should change the name to Robo-nautlius.”

I have done something list-worthy that was never an explicit goal of mine: I’m getting faster. I knew this would come eventually with practice, but I was pleasantly surprised when I realized it’s already happening. It took a friend saying, “you’re getting faster” for me to notice. Duh.

N. macromphalus WIP 3: Almost done. The oranges really balanced the blues and made the whole thing look properly organic. Nautilus, check. But the background was distracting. I took a sponge to it, which did the trick. Pastelbord is also the Magical Sponge Eater, and I spent 15 minutes picking bits of sponge off the painting.

Another list-worthy mention: I’m making a conscious effort to work on my style. Maggie and Rita encouraged me, and I worked out a list of things that make my paintings “mine.” One of those things, which had never occurred to be before (and never would have without this exercise) is that I love to use warm browns and oranges and cool blues and greys in combination. This may or may not be related to my love of da Bears.

So, that’s where I am after the first quarter of 2008. How are y’all doing in terms of goals this year?

Jesus Toucan by Meg Lyman

Digital (vector art done in Inkscape)

Happy Zombie Jesus Day to all! In celebration of this widely-celebrated holiday, have a holy toucan. If you are disinclined to celebrate this day because of your religion, or lack thereof… then here! Have some satire.

This came about because of Jesus Squid. It’s all his fault, and I can see this potentially snowballing out of control, until cute little haloed animal silhouettes are running amok and requiring that we all pay them homage with various morsels of food and bits of our souls.

If you haven’t seen Jesus Squid, there’s a bit of a progression. First, I wanted something very simple; I’m a sucker for simple elegance. Jesus Squid #1 looks like this:

I got several comments saying “it looks like a bird!” and the response, when asked which, was overwhelmingly “toucan.” There was one crow. Anyway, I decided to refine it so nobody would mistake it for an avian:

Good. People liked this one better. It was unequivocally “squid.” Success!

Jesus Toucan has been lurking in the back of my brain since, so I finally got it out. The whole thing made me wonder, yet again, at the nearly infinite ways that viewers will interpret a piece of art. As an artist, you see what you want it to be. Sometimes you’ve been staring at it for so long that you can’t see obvious errors (which is why critique is so valuable), let alone an entirely different interpretation. It’s sort of like the optical illusion with the faces and vases - you see one immediately, and it takes some effort and brainpower to see the other. That the same thing happens with art is fascinating to me. It’s even more pronounced with abstract art, of course, but it’s amazing that it happens at all when the subject is fairly clear-cut.

As an artist, what different (or strange?) interpretations have viewers had of your art? As a viewer, what have you seen that the artist, or other viewers, didn’t?

Striped Pajama Squid (Sepioloidea lineolata) ACEO by Meg Lyman

Ink on ACEO cardstock

$15 - e-mail to buy

I challenge you to find a cuter invertebrate with a cuter name. I have plans for a bigger one of these guys, matching them up with Atkinson’s Peanut Butter Bars.

I bet they’re tasty, too.

Pucktopus by Meg Lyman

SOLD - traded with an artist friend

Did you know the fans throw octopus on the ice at Detroit Red Wing Games? Did you also know that I won a game of Trivial Pursuit with that particular tidbit?

Guardian Angel by Meg Lyman

Mixed media on Canson

$70 - e-mail to buy

Sometimes life is so crazy that the only way things could possibly work out in our favor is to have a guardian octopus looking over us. With holy wings of protection, a halo, and an arm delicately raised in benediction, how can you go wrong?

I am still collecting answers for your previous tax questions. My excuse: I am having a bazillion* people over tonight for a party.

* well, like… 5.

Making birthday cards is way more fun than buying them. You don’t have to spend very long on them, because even if you make little mistakes, your friends and family will still love it more than all their other birthday cards because you made it. Even if it has a squid on it.

Nautilus Trap by Meg Lyman

Ink on notecard

Going to the FWA 2008 Art Show

First, I updated my website with the three meager paintings I did in January. Go look! If you want to be on my mailing list and get notified when I update the site, send me a note.

Something fairly exciting happened this week. I got a call from someone writing a childrens’ book who said she and her partner saw my website and were interested in having me illustrate the book.

Cool, I thought. Let’s see what they have to say. They took me out to lunch and pitched their book to me. It seems like an awesome book, and is nearly finished. Their next step is getting art and a publisher. I’m on track to do some character design for them, and potentially illustrate the whole book.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!

The coolest thing about it (besides the characters being right down my alley) is that they found me in a fairly obscure local newspaper. The awesome artist who organized our participation in the boat show had us write blurbs about ourselves and got them into the local paper. Lesson: do as much as you can, even shows that may not mean a lot of sales, for the exposure. Never let an opportunity pass you by!