Erica and Mark dot com

While going through our state liquor store a few months ago, Erica and I came across a cool bottle of 1800 Tequila.

The bottle was part of their Essential Artists Series, and created by an artist named danyol.

On his website, danyol has a video showing him creating two paintings. I watched the video a couple of times and thought “hey, I can do that!”

So I did.

The process started with drawing outlines of the subjects – in this case Kirk and Spock. I made them in Illustrator so I could scale them to whatever size I needed.

The next part was to find something for the background (what danyol calls “garbage”). It had to be non-white, with unobtrusive color and texture.
I couldn’t find anything on hand, so I had to make something from scratch.
I took some paper and dyed it using tea bags (let the tea soak for 5 minutes, then mash them into the paper). Then I found some Klingon (surprisingly harder to find than you’d expect) and filled the page using a translation of the Start Trek series introduction (Space… the final frontier…)

The Klingon was then pasted onto the canvas using Mod Podge.

Then I added some splatters of paint (ugh – stupidly covering all of the Klingon paper).

Once that looked good, I drew the outlines of Kirk and Spock using a fat Sharpie.

They were really looking cool, and I almost stopped at this point.

Then a little more paint around the outlines and they were done!

I really liked how these turned out.