Puttiki Piece finished

This is how the painting was as I left it, sitting in the kitchen.

The white still to bright so quite a heavy wash of brown goes on and that sorts out a fair chunk of the problem. Then I go arund and hunt down all the tiny bits that need fixed and go over the black lines to pull it together. Then a make the nostrils red and it getting there.

I still need to sort out the wrong white under the armpit so I repaint the brown grain and that finally fixes the problem, so I repaint all the grain on the problem areas.

Then I paint in all the bones, the little skull and the golf tee and all bar some tiny little touches the painting is ready for the Puttiki show.

So if you want to see the picture in the flesh come along to The Puttiki Art Show held in Honey Lu Lu's, Robertson Street Hastings, I'll be there all weekend.

Puttiki Piece part 3

Instead of fixing I continue and paint the Shrunken Human Head, typically they are brown or occasionally white but in Lowbrow circles they can also be green. I've added a neat bone hair clasp and distinctive extended lobes on the ears to the head.

Then on with the tapa background, its the one I've used on the other paintings I'll be showing in Hastings so they should be stylistically themed.

Only as I was finished the purple did I realise that the backgound colours are the same as the in the Two Headed Maori Monster pictures...oops!

I've added some brown washes on the tiki body to pull down the white and added some white to the head, plus some silver to the golf club and the picture is approaching finished.

Just a few more bits to go....

Puttiki Piece part 2

Now we start the body of the tiki, laying down the brown undercoat.

Then slapping on thicker coats of yellow ocher and more brown.

Then laying down neat brown woodgrain of the tiki.

Then its one with the black outlines to replace the yellow.

Then more brown to add the shadows on the body..

Then finally I start to add the white...

...and I screw the puppy and get all the highlites in the wrong places. Hmm thats going to take some fixing.

Puttiki Piece part 1

Its been a while since I last posted up some art but I thought I should post up a sneak behind the scenes of the piece I am doing for the Puttiki Art Show down in Hastings.

When I first started this I had planned to do portrait of Alistair Crowley who famously died in Hastings, I found this cool early picture of him and I swear he's wearing a Lei...

..but the picture is tiny and lacks enough details to work on, so after four hours of pencil work and trying to get the sketch to work I had to abandon my original plan.

So with a heavy heart I rubbed of all the pencil and got my nephew to pose and knocked out a golfing tiki poised to take an almighty swing at a golf ball. Not quite right I thought perhaps he should be using a coconut as a ball or a pineapple, no not quite right. Instead of a golf ball a shrunken human head.

Early pencil lines, lots of grubby lines from the early Crowley design.

Yellow outlines started..


..outlines finished...
...and background red added.

More pictures to come tomorrow.

The Most Vile Video on the Internet

I woke up on Saturday morning on my friend Rargs couch and was relaying my previous evening in my head, checking I hadn't done or said anything bad. When this memory came back of us watching a clip on the computer, a clip so vile and horrible, that it was a terrible to remember as it was watching.

You might have seen it before, you might know what I'm talking anout it features two women doing something that should be illegal for it was deinatly a crime against all good taste. But like all internet virals when I mentioned I'd seen it too my friend Maco, even when we warned him how terrible it was he wanted to see it, he was almost sick in his lap.

How could anybody have filmed this abbomonation let alone let it happen, please don't watch it your mind will never be clean again....

Celine Dion & Anastacia - You Shook Me All Night Long

Puttiki Art Show 28 - 30 August & 4 - 6 September

I'm going down to Hastings this month to exhibit my new Tiki Paintings. This will be my last Art Show in Britain for a while because in September I'm moving to Bangkok.

My best friend comes from Hastings so it'll be nice to see his old home town and get to hangout in the English seaside.



Full details came be found on the Puttiki website.

You might stop the party but you can't stop the future

Lovely article in the Observer music monthly about the early spiral tribe and the free party movement, kinda sad that our youth is now history..

For a brief moment, at vast and lawless raves such as Castlemorton, a generation glimpsed an alternative way of life. Speaking to survivors of the early 90s free party scene, Tim Guest tells the story of how the state crushed the dream

You might stop the party but you can't stop the future

...and all this on a day that I saw a charity store advertising old CDs with "Relive the 90s for only 50p".

Friends in funny places..

Sometimes you don't see a friend for ages and then you see them referenced in a Guardian book review...

Stripping is a serious business. I recently met the director of the Ministry of Burlesque Academy, which provides classes in, among other subjects, fan dancing and glove removal. The young woman was also working towards her PhD on the adult entertainment industry in Edinburgh, called "The Private, the Public and the Pubic: Naked Power in Scotland". Her stage name is Gypsy.

More tease than strip

Shaking hands

I don't read tabloids so I missed this image when it was published..

..its as disturbing as the Elvis/Nixon handshake. 

From left to right Peter Sutcliffe (serial killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper), Sir Jimmy Saville (Radio DJ and Chidrens TV presenter) and Frank Bruno (ex-boxer and pantomime favorite). Its just wrong if they got Boy George to join them they could form the Evil A-Team.

The Last of Messing around with Clay.

I got the last of my mugs back from ceramics and they've come out quite lovely. 

This is my Cargo Cult version of the traditional Tiki Bob mug, it glazed in earthy oxides with a gloss interior. I've had a bit of intrest from fellow collector and may produce a limited run of these mugs this summer.

This is my Crargo version of the Trader Vic's Aloha Coconut Bowl I'm going to see if anyone will swap me an original for my handmade version. 

Big and Clever Swearing - NSFW

Went to see Armando Iannucci new film "In the Loop" last night, it has some of the best swearing and honest depictions of politicians your likely to see on screen.

This clip below is Tuckers's Law which was too sweary for the film, thankfully somebody posted it on youtube..



..I think I have an embroidery project to undertake.

The fruits of messing around in clay..

My ceramics course has been finished for more than a week now, so I guess I better show what I've made. Mostly all the mugs have been fired and glazed now, so this mug was my first, a scowling tribal warrior mug, with a two tone outer glaze and a translucent gloss inner glaze.

Then we have my three face bucket mug, it has a black under glaze that I sponged back and then covered with thick toffee like gloss glaze.

My third mug is based on my Cthulhu Tiki mug design, again with the two tone glaze, which took two firing to get right. The terracotta clay shows through the top glaze quite a bit, so even though the top glaze is green and gray lots of red shows.

I moved from using te terracotta clay into using paper clay which is lot more forgiving and more importantly is a white clay, so the glaze colours are more true.

I glazed this Monster Moai with a black undercoat that I sponged back and applied an opaque green glaze on top. The glaze didn't work as I thought and after it was fired the glaze cracked and continued to "Plink" for two weeks after.

I made two more mugs but am still waiting for them to be glaze fired, so hopefully I'll be posting them after the easter holidays.

Another Giant fish?

Having blogged about the giant pink plush shark I spotted in a local stream, I was interested to read about the South American armored Suckermouth found in a river in Leicestershire...

...Damn that one ugly fish.

BIG UGLY FISH FOUND IN RIVER

Fix it for me!

Its quite the week for geek furniture, Trekkies can now spend £1856 on a replica Captain's Chair but I noticed on eBay a better way to spend that money..

..its the 1977 "Jim'll Fix it Chair", now you can lord it over small children like a benevolent super villain. It even comes with an original badge and ash from Sir Jimmy Savile's cigar.
Ah how times have changed a children tv presenter who's trademark was to always be smoking.

BUY THE "JIM'LL FIX IT CHAIR" £2450

As a child I could never decide on what I wanted Jimmy to Fix for me, I had a vague plan about a life sized fiberglass hipopotamus that was also a submarine/motor home but I could never explain it in words.

My Tiki Mug Collection

Most of my Tiki mug collection lives in cardboard boxes, until such time as I settle down or open my own Tiki bar the only way to keep track of them is through my Ooga Mooga page. So today I opened some boxes and took pictures of about half my collection, I'll attempt to get them all posted up soon.

Atomic Tony Tiki's Tiki Mug Collection

Even More Messin' Around With Mud

When I was working on my last mug I really liked some parts of it and decided to take them further. So I took the photos of it and fiddled with them in Photoshop to mock/sketch my next project.
This new mug is made with Paper Clay, which is an amazing clay with paper pulp mixed with the clay, this gives it amazing properties, you can work dry clay with wet, you just have to wet the clay to get the bits to stick together. Fantastic stuff, I don't think I'll go back to using normal clay.



The mug to the right has been biscuit fired and you can see its first layer of glaze, I'll finally get my three other mugs back glazed on this coming Thursday.


The streaky lines didn't work as well as I thought on the third mug, so for this one I went for a much stronger golf ball texture.

The finished mug it should be fired for Thursday and ready for glazing, I've only got three weeks left of my course, so I'll have to plan my remaining time wisely.

Going to Lan-dahn!!

I was lucky enough to have my Captain Hold Fast mug included in the new book by Jay Strongman 'TIKI MUGS - Artifacts of Polynesian Pop' so I'm of to the big city to show my support and quaff a few much needed Mai Tais.

I Just Can't Get Enough?

I'm not sure how I feel about the "Saturdays", a processed pop girl band created to destroy "Girls Aloud". I think if you want to create something to Destroy a girl-group then build an atomic monster or raise a zombie hoard, but I do know I approve of this Pin-up themed pop video.

Signs of Spring?

After the brief flurries of snow that crippled Britain snow last month its good to see some signs of spring coming.
The snowdrops pushing trough, sap rising and the return of migrating animals.


I was walking to work when I spotted the distinctive colouring of this fishy visitor and was lucky enough to snap some pictures of it.


Ah you know its spring when the giant pink plush sharks* swim upstream to spawn.



*(what's slightly worrying about this is that in the last six months two bodies have been found in this river, perhaps this ain't a toy but a fancy dress costume)

Another secret genre?

I was hunting for a book for a friend and went into a Waterstones near Glasgow Central Train Station and discovered another whole section of books I'd never heard of. I know romantic literature is popular with young ladies and they all love a vampire, so I guess it was an easy jump to create "Paranormal Romance".