I’ll be showing my Chickens of the World and a few of the yokai here in Fukui this month at Cafe Sakura-dori (in the Fukui Shimbun building next to the city courthouse) from the 7th to the 26th. If you happen to be in Fukui this month, stop on by. Here’s the poster for the show:

It’s a very nice little cafe in a great part of town. I hope you can make it!

Here’s a bonus chicken painting to follow up on The Commando and The Zulu I posted recently. The gallery that showed Hanamachi invited me to show another piece, this one F20 size — which I soon found out is BIG! Not huge, mind you, but big compared to all my other paintings so far — roughly 727×606 mm, or 5 times the size of the other chicken paintings. So it was a real challenge and a real pleasure to paint The Wedding.

The Wedding

The model for this painting, I’m proud to say, was my own wedding. Much artistic liberty has been taken — aside from the obvious transformation into chickens — the clothing was changed, and the shrine in the background has some tweaks to it, but it goes fairly well with our wedding photos. The chicken models are from a local farm. It took a fair amount of time to do, but even more to dry, and I was finally able to scan it yesterday morning, about half an hour before I took it to the gallery in Kanazawa.

This was finished last week, but finally became dry enough to scan yesterday. I wasn’t sure when I should post this, because with the A-Yokai-A-Day project, I didn’t want to step on the heels of my previous post… but I suppose I’ll have to post it now rather than wait until November to do so.

Here is my most recent Chicken of the Word: The Commando. He is a Vietnam War era-inspired soldier.

I’m trying to think of more to say than just that… I guess I hope the painting speaks for itself? I can say, though, that after painting The Zulu and The Commando, I don’t want to do any more jungle foliage for a while.

The Commando

On a final note, I have one more chicken painting to post here… but I think I’ll wait until tomorrow so as not to steop on this one’s heels, or the heels of the yokai painting I have to paint and then post tonight. Yikes, I’ve got my hands full!

A few weeks ago I put a question on my Facebook and Twitter pages about what kind of chickens to do next. There were tons of answers, but my favorites were a Zulu warrior and a Jungle Commando. They’ve both been finished for a little while now, but I wanted to wait until I was absolutely sure the oil paint was dry before placing them on my scanner — when I scanned Hanamachi I thought she was dry, but a bit of paint got smeared onto the glass — which is why I’m only posting the Zulu now. The Commando will be a bit longer, as the surface is still a bit tacky and I don’t want to have to clean my scanner again. For now, enjoy this one, and feel free to wait in anticipation for the next one, once it’s dry in a few days.

The Zulu

It’s been a long time since I made a new chicken. Too long, in fact. So it was necessary that one of my first paintings since quitting must be a chicken. Actually, I painted this last week but it’s taken this long to dry. I’m entering it into an art content this weekend, so I was able to finish it just in time. Anyway, here is the next in the Chickens of the World series: Hanamachi.

Hanamachi