they say its your birthday...

its not my birthday too...



but! it is my best freind ever, Audi's (aka:butch,aka:sarah) birthday :)
Shes off celebrating in Omaha so I figured until we can plan something I'd post a birthday post of awesomeness for her.

whoa watch out! atack atack!



shes preety much amazing :) and here are a bunch of random pictures and captions to comemorate.

i've been best buds with Audi since neither one of us was noticable in public as a total freak. freaks in hidding old school



she happens to make the greatest nachos ever



last summer we traveled all over the country together by planes, trains, automobiles and giant boats! this is us @ the met in nyc after we snuck in disgused as art ;)



we even made it to an old navy to hang out with some of Butch's freinds :)



i think this was towards the end of our endless 6+ hour overnight lay over @ the dallas/ fortworth airport from hell. i remember telling her, "just wait just wait. im going to put my beard on you in a photo its going to be awesome. trust me."



on our way to bainbridge island WA on a great big boat :)



this is somewere "very near" florida, but not actualy florida on our way back from hanging out with Sean Herman and CW in Mobile.



what were you guys hanging out with those studs for? half leg sleeves and face tattoos of course!



it was most excelent :)



though small in stature she can still demolish a full pound burger, witness!



and stick a banana in your ear when your not looking, blaine has no clue haha



and if you dont watch out she'll shrink your head afterward!! ok so not realy, this is in seattle feeding her love of actual shrunken heads. she even knits them :)



seen here just north of nashville tenn over looking a massive cliff all captain like with Blaine. i guess its like a mile from taylor swifts place. for thsoe that care about that sort of thing... like blaine haha



she is actualy super man!... metropolis ill in real life.



we drove in a MASSIVE rain storm for 7 hours from nashville to mobile and just when we thought we'd escaped the down pour it started again! so hard it set car alarms off, though some say it was actualy the shock waves set off by having so much awesome in one town at one time



not a big fan of backwoods nashville we celebrated in saint louis that we had safely escaped with milkshakes the size of your head!



for a while audi was in orange city, shocking right?



Audi and a jenny saville piece hanging out together in denver..



with my brothers wife Jenny in holyoke colorado on our way to denver. its aprox 2 hours west of th emiddle of nowere haha.



gotta eat while driving across the country right? shes fueled by juicey peachs most of the time.



and is preety good at envissioning hotrod greatness :)



making ducks out of wire



and working on flathead ford v8s!



happy birthday!!!




On a "progress for the day" note, this tattoo wandered back in the door after over a year being m.i.a. looks like it healed nice though!



so we sat down and finished it up quick, sorry for the blood staining and what not. hopefulyl she'll be back in a few weeks and ill get some healed shots :)

I'm not surprised, but I never feel quite prepared

Blog day 3:

Some days time goes slow. Today while at work I'm pretty sure stopped going forward all together and started heading backwards. Needless to say it was a slow day at the studio.

When fate finally let it reach quitting time I was like a kid on the last day of school sprinting towards my car. Freedom! I was dead set on being productive today no matter the slow start.

Had some nice clouds on the way home.



When I got home I noticed my mom had left me a magazine from her Colorado trip to see my brother and his new baby girl.



Low and behold he's inside it with his wife Jenny!



A little closer up you can see that as brothers we share a love for rocking some truly ridiculous facial hair :)



After that I got down to business. I decided to take advantage of the remaining day light and try out some new paint, new spray caps and a spray clear I'd yet to try.

I keep a 'test' panel to try out new things on so I don't ruin a project in progress. If time has taught me anything it's that some paints get along, while others bubble crack and peel into a nightmare. 

So any new thoughts get tried out on this panel.



A plus side of it having so many things on one panel is that if i, say spray the whole thing with clear lacquer. I'll be able to see if it agrees with all the pre existing media.

Along with acrylic, spray paint, and glazes I've also used it to try out lace painting on it before tonight.



Here's my 'after' for tonight. The blue streak is my new paint and a small cap. I was expecting a sharper, crisper line but the small spattering created almost a glow effect I kind of like. I might be that the cap just needs "broken in" and will be sharper later so I'll have to keep that in mind later when using it. I also sprayed a single layer of clear on the panel. It seems to have agreed with everything and left a nice smooth surface but not very glossy.



While this was drying outside with the Mosquitos I headed to my painting studio and finished out this painting of my hands/ arms. It's watered down acrylic paint on watercolor paper. I don't know why I haven't cracked open my new set of water colors yet, probably just used to my acrylic pallet.

I took more pix along the way but I'm doing this from my phone so you get to be bored by only a small collection of them.









After finishing it I cut it out of the sheet and placed it into a bubble glassed oval frame. It looks lame so no pix but it'll keep it safe until I find a better spot for it.

I like to stagger my products finishing one project and starting on the next in the same sitting so I always have a few days to get fresh eyes before I finish a piece. So tonight I started on this girl. I don't typically paint in low opacity and in layers but I thought I'd give it a shot.

This is how that went.





Alright productiveness! 

* oh! And this morning driving to work I was listening to mpr, Minnesota public radio, and they were talking with this adventure junkie who runs gearjunkie.com 

It was pretty interesting/ inspiring to me so after down loading the mpr app - I love mpr/ NPR type stations - I found the web link to today's  show you can listen to online.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/07/30/midday1/

This took forever to create on my phone

Blog day two:

Well my Tuesday-Wednesday weekend was over so this morning I packed up my stuff and headed back north and back to work.  And I got a whole block away before I got a phone call reminding me of the 27 cans of spray paint that I left behind. So a quick trip around the block and I was on my way, for real this time though.

I saw this fella outside of a gas station near council bluffs, and seeing how my car happens to run on dinosaurs I pulled over to fuel up and snap a shot.



I got to work a bit early and snagged a super tasty smoked cheeseburger from the BBQ trailer that is across from the studio on week days. Www.yourhouseofq.com should link you to him, soooo good. Nothing compliments a rainy day like smoked food :)



Well maybe a smoke break Sean decided.



Having had an appointment reschedule to tomorrow I had some rainy day time to kill and scribbled up a skull, fire, roses combo. I generally change how I'm drawing roses about every six weeks, this round I've been focusing more on the shapes of the pedals rather then the overall compositions or centers. I mixed it up a little today using a photo reference from  my yard and drew some roses that were more closed then I would normally draw them. I think that working on this phases could help in future compositions as the stem and thorns are more focused on so I could use them in place of were i might other wise use some fillegry, or some sort of neuvo-ish flourish. 



After my last appointment I cleaned up and headed towards home. I've got a 42 mile drive home from work every day so it definitely  gives me some time to think. I've got alot of things in progress but not quite ready to post, and I didn't really want to make posting past projects a norm. It seems a little counter productive to my goal of being more productive. However nothing to exciting happened today so I thought I'd post about my first ever BBQ competition I was involved with last Saturday. That's close enough to current to count right? Under 7 days?

Yeah I think so.

So one of my best friends Charles, Aka the butcher... Because, well he's my butcher haha. Any how Charles and I are giant food nerds waisting tons of hours glued to the food network, taking food focused multiple day road trips and trying to cook new yummy food.

Now as lovers of BBQ and spice when we heard that our town of Hawarden was having a rib cooking competition we new we had to get in on it. After a meeting with all the involved teams we found we were each cooking a minimum of 50 pounds of 9 back slabs of ribs. 

Realizing that we wouldn't have a rig large enough to smoke that quantity we opted for a grill/ oven process. And we started early. 

This was my view at hours only seen by me in extreme situations. You know, like biscuits and gravy or bbqing ribs :)



I had to tattoo a few people so after we had our marinated, grilled ribs placed to cook in the oven I took off to work. Charles ran back and forth between the two houses when I was gone keeping an eye on things and his dad helped him get everything set up at the event.

I got back into town just in time for the gates to open and among all sorts of fancy smokers and tents I found charles



We had a great time, the weather was wonderful and we had nearly twice as large of a turn out as expected!
Here are some random photos from the evening.







Knowing that it was a crowd vote it was hard to pick which way to go with the ribs. We didn't want to go to bold or spicy as we were trying to please the masses not a panel of judges, and over all we ended up a scant 3 votes short of third place out of 12 or 13 teams! Awesome! I had a great time and can't wait to go bigger and better next year. Hopefully I'll have the whole day off next time so I can be more active instead of a great sue chief. Still fun though :)

Alright that seems like enough for tonight, I think I'll go draw.