Quick pencil sketch on tracing paper for a mural/room divider I painted for the Hotel DeAnza’s breakfast room on the second floor. San Jose, California. Quite a few years ago. – the color photo is a color copy of an original photo i have somewhere, cannot locate it just yet. 😉
Just a few snaps of a mural, trompe l’oeil painting I made years ago for a decorator working on the interior of a luxury hotel in Kirkland, WA. – This one one of the penthouse suites that had 2 hidden closets behind my paintings. Literally had about 2.5 days to complete both and move on to the next. Fun times.
This is an old painting project. I’m trying to remember the year but am having a hard time. 😉 . . . I painted the walls and umbrella vaulted ceiling in the round room. – It was a showcase house in Los Altos Hills, CA.
Old project in my old studio out on Yosemite street in the San Francisco Bay View area. – I bought up a ton of oval wooden boxes and painted the outside. (and inside) – Here they are, on my table in the studio. ~>
Color xerox copies of the box lids below ~>
A few other studio shots. I was working on an acrylic painting, on canvas.
The shot below was taken on an open studio day. Not sure what year.
Painted these a long time ago. Acrylic on foam core. – then contour cut. . . . they were hung in “Where the Wild Things Are” at the Sony Metreon event area during a halloween haunted house for kids.
watercolors to a digital piece of art.
Just a small “How I did this” – I started with a series of watercolors, done on a watercolor block. – very wet on wet technique, just using strong colors, to bleed out. Some of them, i masked a section, making a rectangular shape that cut across the paper. – After the painting dried. I coated it with a thick gum arabic solution and then used a hot blow dryer to quickly dry the surface and create cracks on the sticky gum arabic. . . . you never knew what you would get, sort of the fun part of the project. – Once the gum arabic dried, you have a nice slick surface with cracks. So now I mixed up a nice a dark indigo color, washed down the whole image, let it set for a  minute or two, then I buffed it away like i was wiping a copper etching plate, careful not to lift out any pigment in the cracks, only want to remove the surface color . . . following? – what I got was the dark stain to stay in the cracks. . . . after a day of drying, I popped it off the block. – I painted about 30 different pieces. some even had an image in the center. Sold most.
So now I have some patterns and watercolor textures. . . . I added them to a digital piece I was working on. – Put a clipping mask onto 3D objects I created in Adobe illustrator. a few actually. see below details.
The bottom image is close to the finished version.
When I had a painting and design business years ago I would draw designs out on velum or thin tracing paper and then transfer the image on to a canvas or wall – whatever surface it was painted on. I sometimes used transfer paper or rubbed graphite on the back of the drawing and then re-traced the image.
This is what other panels of the paintings looked liked in progress. The color images were scanned from older color prints. Pre-digital cameras.
Rick Pirman photos and design ~ past and present
Painted projects from past years
w o r k s 