Painting Pictures. My Fake Mayan Artwork.

I was reading this article on some Do-It-Yourself website. Basically cheap shit to do in your spare time. I happened to catch an article about decorating your house. One of the suggestions was to hit up a craft shop for canvas and acrylic paints and doing your own paintings. I had kind of forgotten about it until last week when I decided to go ahead and give it a shot. Up until now my only experiences with painting were back in high school, in art class. So what motivated me to try it now, I have no idea.

I hit up the Hobby Lobby and spent $15 on some cheap canvases, a set of acrylic paints, and three little paint brushes. After I got home I flipped through this illustrated book of Mayan history that I had bought before I went to Mexico in 2008. I found a few pieces of Mayan artwork that reminded me of the stuff I had seen in Mexico, and started sketching on the canvasses with a pencil. Once I was happy with the results, I went ahead and started playing around with the paint.

The first picture is my rendition of a Vision Serpent. This is a pretty common subject of the Mayans. Statues, paintings, carvings, etc. Comparative to the actual original depictions, I fucked it up. But I still think it is tight. The tongue thing is supposed to be fangs, actually, and there is a long tongue that is supposed to lick out. But I fucked it up and made the fangs more tonguelike because I ran out of space. The two little things under the snake are my initials in Mayan heiroglyphics. Again, this is just something that is kind of my version of some old artwork...I wasn't trying to be dead on, I was just having fun.

This is something I stole from a Mayan mural. Originally it was a very small part of a much larger piece of art. I just liked the way the guy looked. The tongue is my own addition. I just thought it looked cool when I sketched/outlined it.

Both of the paintings are 16"x 20", so they're quite large. I'm pretty happy that I'm getting two pretty big pieces of art for 15 bucks. Plus I'll have tons of paint left over for future pieces.

I used a really big brush because I didn't have the patience for fine detail. I think the next set of paintings I do I will try and do some finer brush strokes. But for now I'm still experimenting. I never really had much of an interest in doing art, but I've now realized it's pretty fun.

I'm still working on these paintings actually, there are more colors/textures I'll be adding in the future some day when I'm feeling inspired.