Studio Time

This is old… like really old… late “eighties” old.

I used to be obsessed with the airbrush. (I no longer have a Badger 100 (sg)… That is what this was done with though. These days I have an Iwata Eclipse (gravity feed) and a special edition Paasche VSR90 (which they no longer make) which still works very nicely 35 years later.)

It was one of the most productive periods of my life. You can turn out images in just a few minutes with one. The prep may take some time. Cutting stencils out of acetate can be really time consuming. Once you have the stencils cut… it’s fairly simple to build images with them though. Once you have a library of stencils, things go pretty fast. Even without stencils you can do some incredible things pretty easily.

This was a simple line drawing that I traced on to acetate and cut out with a number 11 X-acto blade. One stencil for the shoulders, arms and neck, one for the legs, the dress and the shoes. The straight lines that build the staircase are just the edge of the acetate sheet. The lights at the top are simply dots sprayed with opaque white ink. I just moved the stencils around and sprayed until I’d built up the image. Some of the splatters are intentional… some not. I like the way they accent the image, add random elements and make things a bit less sterile than airbrush can be capable of.

The colors are Winsor Newton watercolors. The original painting is on Crescent museum board.

Conceptually? …I don’t always love the fashion industry. The artificiality and crass commercialism of it can be really tiresome.

The title is taken from “Sleepwalk“, a song by Christian Death. (Something else I used to be obsessed with.)