Month: December 2017

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Side Note

Hi all! I’ve not been posting as often as I would like. I feel that I need to share with you whats going on. I’ve purposefully kept personal things out of my work. While they affect the outcome, I was always told to keep things professional. I’ve realized it is not really possible to separate these things. all of it goes into creating. It’s part of the emotional influences. We create from our heart more than anything.

Frogman 1 process sketch 1

I’ve had problems with my health for a while. for the most part nothing so life threatening. Just things to make some days more difficult. lately there has been more of the difficult days. This has caused problem with my day job because of having to be out so much lately. Being able to pay the bills is important to me. My family is my highest priority.

Frogman 1 process sketch 2

To depend on my greatest skill for support is my ultimate goal. I love creating images for stories. To show people the things I see is a great ability. I look forward to doing this forever or at least as long as I can. I guess to be able to do this and survive, I need to find an audience that will buy my work.

Frogman 1 process sketch 3

What I guess I would ask of you is to please share my work. If you would like to purchase my work, prints or commission something please contact me to discuss arrangements at richard.thaxton@xtillos.com.

Frogman 1 process sketch 4

May we have many more fantastic adventures in the future.

Frogman 1 process sketch 5a

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Creative Celebration Update #3

As promised here are the details in photos of my creations for the 20th Wedding Anniversary gifts to my wife and the ones we got for our daughter. The basic idea for the paper is from when I would make my own stationary to write to my wife, before we were married. It was made the same way aa this project but in smaller scale.

First was the creation of the wrapping paper. I used a roll of 36″ poster paper, acrylic paints, a 2″ brush, water and saw horses with planks for a large makeshift table.

 

I worked in sections basically making a color wash stain of various colors with the acrylic paints and water.

 

Once I had what I felt was enough paper painted to wrap with and it was fully dry, I moved inside to start decorating it. First thing was to cut the roll so that the painted part was more manageable. Then I started painting some hearts and balloons on part of the paper.

 

For the next part I had to get decorative stickers and of course the gifts. The stickers were some elements that I couldn’t make. Also, there’s no sense recreating the wheel. I like the way they fit each person. The focus for my wife is the hearts and flowers. For our daughter the focus was butterflies and balloons.

 

I made custom name cards for each gift. Most were in the form of riddles.

 

Next were the personalized hand crafted cards. They’re created with Canson paper, scrapbook pages, a color printer, hot glue and more of the stickers.

 

Both cards were butterfly fold with personalized printed transparent inserts and envelopes. This is how the finished cards turned out.

 

Everything turned out great and the back story made for some great points to reminisce and share with our daughter.

DSC_0329

 

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My Ipad Was Almost Mine

Well, after experimenting a little with my new Ipad, it turns out that the Ipad is really helpful for doing school work. In particular IB Art classes. So it has been quite useful for my daughter. I got to play around with Garage Band before the second wave hit. It’s OK though I still have old school illo journals to work in!