One Handed

So I stopped writing again for more than six months. I had one post I thought about writing last december, but I ended up writing it earlier this year but should have been on a december because that was when the thought came up to my head, but its pretty much useless now since I never got to finish it anyway, I guess I was just too busy.

For my last post six months ago I was supposed to post pictures about some paintings I made about comic book heroes. It was because of some striving artist I found in facebook, this guy entered a comic book hero drawing contest or something like that, he did have a slight sleigh of hand in drawing but he was complaining in facebook how he lost the whole contest to some amateur artist and swore himself that nobody would even buy those ugly winning pieces, and he was turning to facebook for attention and everybody around was just so goddam polite to say that his drawings were still amazing like phonies not telling you how terrible you look today.

I was angry with what the art hopeful said and anger is as good as the emotional fuel I need together with alcohol to drive myself to paint. And I made a lot of my own comic book hero paintings to prove his was as good as garbage, and I swear I was at my finest myself yet on these paintings. I was going to post them here in my blog instead at facebook but then my laptop where the scans of those paintings were saved unto crashed, and I have to start from scrap all over again and now I'm the one sounding like the phony saying I'm better in painting when I don't even have anything to prove it.

I just have to get that old laptop working, I got a new one though and at least I have one new painting to post.

I also broke my right hand about two weeks ago after I smashed it into a concrete wall, because I got to my anger boiling point again with my old man, and nobody heats it up better than him. I know I am older and I have better patience, tolerance and goddam maturity towards everything but maybe its just that none of our stars were aligned that we never get along so well. My old man had been complaining about all the crap that he could think off to me and I have been holding myself at bay for so many weeks that I finally blew up, I just needed leverage to shut him up.

I broke two bones of my right hand, it became so goddam painful around 15 minutes after I smashed it, then my right hand started to feel hot, then it started to swell and finally it got harder and harder to move at all. I got a small piece of wood and had it strapped around my hand so that the wrist wouldn't move around that much, then I had to drink a lot of beer as a substitute for painkillers that night.

The doctor said that I should be having my arm in a cement cast, I say to hell with the cast, I don't want to look like a person coming from an accident with that cast, and where all of my friends could write crap and just about anything where I could read it anytime at work, while eating and when I wake up, for a whole month. The doctor said it should be better by around a month, I complained that it was too goddam long and he just cut it short into a week to make me happy, though he was right because after a week it hasn't been any better.

I had a blue hand strap with an iron base to replace the makeshift hand plank I had been wearing for 3 days, my right hand was not totally disabled but I found it hard to do a lot of things, the hardest being

• eating with a spoon
• holding a beer bottle
• wiping my crack
• writing
• killing mosquitoes with a clap
• continue painting
• brushing my teeth

And just about anything that requires me to move my wrist around. And talking about brushing my teeth, There's this dentist through a good friend of mine for more than a year ago, not that I needed to fix any of my teeth but the dentist is quite pretty. I liked her for more than a year already but I don't know how the hell am I going to win her heart. Probably another reason that has kept my head busy the past year though I never did mention about her since then.

New Brush And No Bush

I decided to get myeslf a new paintbrush because the old one I had for eight years looks pretty much busted, the brush tip has stiffened and it had turned sideways and it now works better off scratching your ear canal.

I got the old one for about 35 bucks, or something around that price because I don't spend much dough on my pursuit of art. The bookstore didn't have that same brush anymore or even anything about that size or price so I had to go to this other small art shop I've seen before because I swear they should have everything you can use to brush with from their display window, probably even those brushes drag queens use to swipe their faces with, because the art shop is surrounded by parlors run by drag queens and they could have gone inside the art shop asking for one, out of curiosity of course. Anyway the closest they had to the one I was looking for was around 80 bucks and I was having second thoughts about the price when the owner came in and saw me holding it, he started asking me if I paint and I told him I guess so and he continued smiling and asking me questions like where I go to school at. I didn't know what the hell he wanted to talk about and I wasn't in a mood to go talking especially about me and the arts because I am no artastic person who sees irrational meaning in the silliest of drawings, so I just paid for the paintbrush and left. He was no businessman selling brushes either, he could have helped me out by telling me what a great goddam brush it was at 80 bucks but he was an art-man, he wanted to know if I painted and maybe he's going to convince me to join their society of art-men who would talk about paintings over colored coffee. I am no art person, there is no traces of self expression in my paintings except that I was drunk and I only paint because I want to.

Anyway I wanted to try painting over the week to try out the new brush, I had some leftover acrylic paints I had from painting my gundam models and I decided to use them instead of watercolor, it took me four nights and a lot of liquor to get me to paint this.

You could probably see the person I had in mind, anyway it was a good brush to paint with and my drunken fist technique hasn't failed me yet, but I wasn't used to acylic paint, they dry fast especially over an airconditioned room, I have to make a new color palete every half an hour and it explains the different shades of color around his face, but its him alright, new brush and no bush.

Gundam Kits

5 things I'm currently into

-building gundam models

What the hell is a gundam model?

Gundam is a popular japanese anime fiction series that features giant robots or mobile suits and gundam is basically how they call these robots. Gundams are easily distinguishable through their heads because they always have a V shaped antenna on their foreheads, a protruding block on their chins and exhaust vents around their faces, more often on the sides of their faces, moreover they are long-limbed robots and they seem to have plated armors around their bodies, shoulders and knees in particular. The Gundam series has been around for almost thirty years and their franchise has gone from japanese manga to different tv series, model kits, video games and anything a cultish object.

amuro ray’s RX-78-2 from mobile suit gundam, the grandaddy of all the gundams.

I knew very little about the gundam universe, I haven’t even seen any gundam episode in one sitting, I only have one gundam manga and I haven’t even read it, I’m only into the model kits. I always fancy looking at gundam models before when I was a teenager, partly because maybe I was into fiction and maybe they just look so goddam cool, some of them cost a lot though. It wasn’t til 2000 when I first tried making one, it was a V2 gundam and though it was the only one I had, I enjoyed the whole trouble of building the kit and staring at it over at my desk. Before I didn’t make much gundam models, say one model in six months or even in a year. It wasn’t til last december when I decided to go back to building these kits again and I'm building fast, I was trying to find a hobby or something to get my head distracted with because I just feel lonely everynight.

In a nutshell, gundam models are divided into scales which are:

SG (speed grade)
or HCM-Pro (high complete model progressive)
these models come in one piece and they need no more assembly, for people who are into gundam models but do not want to go through the trouble of building them, suitable for little kids

SD (super deformed)
As what their name implies, these gundam models look very goofy having very small bodies yet very big heads like they were cartoon gundam figures

1/144 FG (first grade)
I haven’t had one so I don’t know how to describe them much except that these gundam models are small and will take a lot of skill, paint and patience to build, but these models cannot do much movement with their limbs.

1/144 HG (high grade)
These kits usually stand around 4 inches tall, unlike 1/144 scales these models can do more movements, almost every gundam model is available in this scale.

1/144 HGUC (high grade universal century)
These kits are slightly bigger than the 1/144 HG, say about 5 inches. Universal century represents a certain timeline in the gundam universe so I think only certain gundam models that are in this timeline are included in this scale, I think.

1/100 HG
More bigger, around 7 to 7.5 inches tall, better mobility, better details.

1/100 MG (master grade)
Is just around the same size as a 1/100 HG but it is hell more articulate with its limbs becasue they have an internal skeleton system, you could even open their cockpit hatches to see the pilot seats.

1/60 PG (perfect grade)
Very expensive, freakingly detailed, only very few gundam models were given the honor of appearing in a 1/60 scale. I can’t afford one.

conversion/resin kit
these are the hardest kits to build because the kits come in pale resin color and you have to paint everything from scratch

This is sven cal bayan’s strike noir gundam (1/100 MG) from the ce 73 stargazer movie posing hopelessly in front of my old painting of marilyn monroe. I found this painting stacked at the bottom of my closet, I had to find something to cover my desk because it is a mess, I remember I did this painting around seven years ago and I was about to throw it away because I feel there is something wrong with it, her missing mole is one thing but came this girl who saw it and was begging for it so I decided to keep it anyway. It’s like some things you have that you don’t pay much attention to but you start to hold on to it when somebody wants to take them away.

April Fool

Ariel took this picture and that’s me and its high noon yesterday and I’m painting the wall of his internet café, I had to get myself drunk so I could paint good, in fact I hadn’t had anything since I woke up except for beers, I didn’t’ feel like eating anyway. My old man kept calling me too, he’s probably worried what I was up to because I had been dead drunk the night before that jason had to drive me home, I could have taken a crack at him and have ariel answer his calls and tell him I just blew up my brains to kingdom come and greet him an april fool’s afterwards, pretty nasty joke though, I told him Im busy painting the walls of ariel’s internet café.

My uncle got himself into the hospital last friday night because his lungs collapsed, he smoked a lot when he was about my age, my old man used to tell me that he had packs of cigarettes everywhere, he stuck them from almost every hole in his office that you could just pick up a stick anytime you wanted to smoke, and sometimes you just smoked for the sake of it because they’re everywhere, it was kind of good though that none of my cousins, his kids followed his career in smoking.

I was off to bed early yesterday because I had a pounding headache from the high noon heatwave and alcohol while at ariel’s café, yet I got up early again today at four in the morning and I’m writing this post and I’m eating pizza with beers before sunrise. I was as hungry last night but my goddam headache got over me, its been a while since I had that kind of headache, the one where you could feel your pulse pounding at either side of your temple that you just don’t want to move any muscle or have the slightest thought about anything so that the blood won’t go pumping up so fast in your veins, and funny I can fall asleep faster than being drunk and without doing any stupid things like sleeping under my desk.

Art Gallery

Some of my drunken watercolor paintings.

Liam gallagher of oasis. When I was in sophomore high I bought one oasis album what's the story? (morning glory), and there's a lot of pretty good songs there. People think this is a painting of sly stallone in his movie cobra less the sub machine gun.

This girl donita who graced the mtv screens some years back, I was drunk and I spilled watercolor into this painting that it took me more time to redo it, made a lot of effort in painting the hair.

That leslie comedian guy who starred in the naked gun movies, I had to leave brush strokes below because I felt the painting began to look more like a photograph, or was just too drunk to finish it.

One time I lost my yellow watercolor but I painted anyway and this is how it looked, pretty good though, the colors add up to the atmosphere making it more hannibal lecterish.

Another painting, I don't paint people's faces all the time.

Mr Jones and Mr Smith

This is the duo who starred in the two men in black movies

Its a painting I made some 4 years ago

Using just 5 watercolors, red blue yellow black and white, over a big piece of white cardboard

And a brainload of depression sunk in hard liquor

It was those days when there was this hard liquor in the market that was bubble gum flavored and the liquor was light blue in tint, the alcohol was so strong that I had to mix it with coke to make it easier to drink and that was what I drank when I painted this portrait. I was using watercolor then so I also had a glass of water beside me where I washed my brush every so often and washing red blue yellow white and black colors in this glass turned the water into a dark muddy color, which looked no different from the glass of light blue liquor with coke that I drank from. And since the hard liquor was also kicking in my senses, every so often I forgot from which glass to take a shot from.

Never underestimate a depressed drunkard