The Rainfrog Chronicles II

Hello,

a couple of new rainfrog drawings have emerged over the weeks, they are also very seasonal and colorful. I’ve also added some inspirations.

Some time ago someone looked up and noticed a huge hole in the sky.  She phoned it in and was asked to immediately shut the hole down and stop doing whatever was causing the hole, because otherwise the space would get in and fry us up alive if it remained open for too long. We got a couple of other trial holes and a sneak peak, did a review on it and decided we don’t want the planet to burn to crisp. For about thirty years everyone stayed on track and the trial holes in the sky were healing steadily and starting to close down. Years later on a very regular day, someone started secretly smoking up some skyhole gas into the sky, hoping they wouldn’t get caught and noone would notice. A great plan in all the details, besides the huge sky hole getting bigger right above their heads that really ruins all the sky photos. This has been the story of a huge secret factory with very small hands, and it will have a happy ending soon.

 

The rainfrog enjoying suntanning

 

Rainfrog in its own element

 

“The desert rain frog is spending the day dug into sand. It emerges at night and wanders about.” Wikipedia

 

Rainfrog enjoying the urban nature at the botanical garden

 

Rainfrog having such a great day, its arranged its own folk dance

 

The paintings are for sale and ship internationally, you can find the listings when you click the links or see the cartoon sketch category here.

Advertisements

Raven paintings with ink

This week’s raven paintings are so colorful, I don’t know what happened. I guess it’s summer.

Figure drawing with pastels

I was just excited to try pastels again, the last time I tried them it was pretty frustrating, so I was very happy that I found a better way to use them today. I guess the beginner tip would be to start with sepia instead of 48 colors and take twice as much as papers as you need, so you can trash half of the tries.

So in the spirit of all this, I will add a nice quote from Silicon Valley.

Pete: I used to take a tampon, soak it in grain alcohol, and stick it up into my rectum. That got me high, Richard, but not half as high as the drug you just gave me. You know what that drug’s called? —  A second chance.

 

 

Links:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/619971397

https://www.etsy.com/listing/606135534

https://www.etsy.com/listing/619971943

The rainfrog chronicles cartoon drawings

These are ink illustrations on paper and are available here.

“The rainfrog is going to steal a cow instead” is inspired by a story I heard about the tribes in isolated forests where the process of proving yourself includes showing others that you can kill someone from the other tribe. At some point the tribe elders realized a single killing ends up being a long line of separate inter-village bloody vendettas which will never end and that isn’t useful for anyone. After that they’ve come to conclusion they will secretly start stealing cows from one another instead of killing one another. Chivalry is not dead. So if someone pisses you off, it’s a possibility that you can solve it by stealing a cow, but you have to do it in a really skillful and an impressive way.

The rainfrog is going to steal a cow instead

***

“The spider saga” – the rainfrog is truly considering what Mr.Tolkien has written into his diary: “True courage is about knowing not when to take a life, but when to spare one.” And then Mandela had gone and said: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” After that you have to consider the words of Winston Churchill “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” And at the end of the spider sagas, you can reflect on the thoughts of Oscar Wilde: “It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears, is said to be seen in San Francisco.”

Tolkien wrote: “True courage is about knowing not when to take a life, but when to spare one.”

***

“First flower of the spring” – for a Nordic rainfrog, the spring is extremely important, because it’s rebirth for most of the nature and everyone has to relearn some of the daily things. You’ve forgotten completely how the ground looks and that there are colours in the nature, and daylight, you crash your car a couple of times because you have forgotten the Sun, you crash your bike a couple of times because you have forgotten the physics, you start remembering feelings. Sometimes this is all delayed, so you’re a bit angry at the weather, curse you, weather!

But at the end, every rainfrog gets a kick out of the first yellow blossom they see and it makes them think of the wonderful blooming summer ahead.

How to decorate your room so people would think you’re crazy – part 2

This is part two of the how to tutorial, or a sequel to a topic that I felt has really been covered too little – it’s about how to decorate your private space in a way it will remain a private space and to use weird things that people are scared of.

We’ve covered the idea of multiplying a specific painting or other  artwork into amounts that will create a distraction. In a nutshell, you can put a huge number of the same cute items onto the walls and your room will remain empty.

The other trick would be to buy  frames which stand on their own and then turn them down, so only the backside is visible. This is a huge expression of issues, dark aura, eerie ghosts of the past and so on. People have been trained to think that a backside of a painting means something awful, so if you happen to decorate your house with the backsides of frames or paintings, it can not be argued that a room is never to be visited again.

You think this is a normal sight of a backside of a canvas? Uhuh, how about you imagine now – a person flipped it over! Because of reasons!

 

So far we’ve established that humans are scared of these art related things:

• cute topics in a huge number of copies
• flipsides of artworks

 

 

How to decorate your room so people would think you’re crazy

If you went out and became entirely crazy, the first thing you will do is buy a couple of paintings to decorate your room with just to let everyone know you’re mad now.

You’d can’t pick war or crime themes, because everyone is used to pictures of people without heads or people on crosses from the old times and that is not considered creepy but historically aware, so you’d need to go another direction.

The best way might be to pick something cute or pretty but then multiply it. You will successfully catch someones attention with something cute so they wouldn’t be scared to admit they had noticed it but then they can have a look around and see too many of the same things there are. Cute things in massive herds is considered one of the most eerie sights in the world that is still okay to talk about. It’s scary but acceptable amount of scary, so this is the last level of scary people won’t become blind to.

This will conclude today’s home decoration how-to, I hope you will have a beautiful and a productive day after seeing the illustration paintings.

We can see an illustration of an okay amount of jellyfishes – perhaps one alone or with another smaller replica:

 

But here we are witnessing an amount of jellyfishes that is not socially acceptable and will ruin lives and relationships:

Enter the Newer Ship

I have an idea for a business. After you’ve set up your new furniture, our company will roll out a couple of workers who will hold up sample conversations in different clothes and topic arrangements in appropriate settings, so you can see which type of conversations match your furniture the best. This will help you select the correct people to be your friends who will match the apartment.

Nature versus paintings

Who is the blacknwhite’st of them all! I’ve been making these abstract black and white forest paintings and one day I woke up and the entire world looked like someone had put on filter on it! It was the best two days of all winter, really amazing!

Next week when it will get to -20F, maybe we will get something amazing again, keeping my fingers crossed! Aurora borealis wise, we were not that lucky this week, there was a huge aurora on above the North,  Feb 22th I think, but it was cloudy. I have my Aurora Forecast app set to alarm me, but it’s my morning routine these days to check it too.   If you’re in Estonia and want to keep your eye out for northern lights and you use Facebook, you should join the group “Eestimaa virmalised”, you won’t miss a storm.

Besides Aurora there is another light show you have to see once in your lifetime – it’s light pillars and you see them because the water crystals in the air reflect all the light sources in the city all the way up to the sky, like this: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160208.html The Sun might have a pillar too sometimes.

If you happen to see either one of these, you’re very lucky because you probably witnessed the only or one of a couple of days in the year it’s possible, so take a mental picture!

Portrait photo is taken by Triin Erg

 

 

The forest artwork is available here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/590823765 (shipping is worldwide).

Abstract ink paintings on canvas

Black and white abstract paintings on canvas:

Jon Snows Nothing (oil portrait)

How to paint cute men and puppies, the key to oil painting is to learn everything you can about oil paints, then just practice about ten years and you’ should be good to start trying. So obviously I was scared to re-unite with oil paints after the long pause in any other way that to try to remember what I used to know and try a couple of portraits. This is the second portrait painted just for fun and during this one I remembered how important it is to select (or have) a set of brushes that works in your hand, so you might have to modify them a bit or use the wrong ones. So far, both trial paintings have been useful in different ways, even though they look a lot alike.

My glorious set of new paints, very proud.

First thing I always want to do is to spend a lot of time sketching the portrait, even if it seems like a waste of time because it will all get painted over right away. To avoid getting everything dusty with pencil lines, sketch on a different paper first I guess.

I thought a mistake here was to make the flyaway locks and hairs before the background, but not really, if your background is very simple, you can blend it pretty nicely and add layers. 

I figured since it was so obvious what I was doing (making a portrait of Kit Harington is the easiest choice if you’re going for cute) I though I’d like to overkill it and add a puppy, and overkill it twice – adding the magical puppy dire wolf who saves everyone.  

 

Here is the final version of the portrait painting of  Jon Snow and Ghost the wolf. I had a lot of fun painting it and it made me remember that oil paints are really special.