Wee & Nerdy
For several years, beginning in the early 2000s, I made tremendous use of four inch square canvases. They’re fast, and fun, and versatile… honestly I’m not sure why I ever stopped.
They’re large enough to fit a fair amount of detail, with an inch-deep profile so you can paint around all four sides. And small enough that you can finish multiple paintings very quickly and feel like a big shot! I pursued a number of different projects with them, often spanning across multiple canvases.
This page is a celebration of the good times I had making all these little faces and scenes. Maybe it’s even a way to inspire myself to make some more.
It all started with the tornadobellies. To which you may understandably respond:
What is a Tornadobelly?
Well, let me sort of tell you. They are characters that I used to paint a lot, each of which tends to represent a single emotion or idea. They’ve got spherical, featureless heads, and big round bodies with a maelstrom in the belly. The funnel of this tornado extends out the back, making them look a bit like an umbilicus or stem, depending on the context.
These are three different versions of the tornadobelly called Shy Guy. The original was a much larger, sixteen by twenty inch canvas (beloved by me, but now long lost. A sad tale for another time.) I’m not sure where the idea came from, but I felt like it was worth exploring.
I made quite a few large tornadobellies with different moods and environments, and then I found my first four inch canvases. It occurred to me that I could have fun reproducing variant designs on the little canvases, and that’s how I started. I got a whole bunch of them, and began populating them with all sorts of tornadobellies!
This design was called Serene. I made a couple of them, with a warm green tornadobelly, relaxing against a background of cool pthalo green.
Grow was a reproduction of a design that I had done previously in blue and white on a much larger canvas. I have no evidence that it ever existed, now, but the purple one is pretty.
The first iteration of Reach had a red background on a sixteen by twenty inch canvas, but when I translated it to the four inch squares I thought it would be quite zesty to spread it across two canvases.
I was right, of course.
Leaning into the umbilical nature of the tornadobelly, Born called the entire biological process into question. There are a couple of versions of The Little Empty, which was a kind of ponderance on the hollowness of the tornadobelly design. Then there’s Shine, which has a more positive vibe and perhaps implies that this particular tornadobelly has an electrical cord. And Blue is an underwater adventure, where the tornadobelly becomes an old-fashioned breathing apparatus.
I was feeling quite inspired and engaged! The speed of working on these little canvases allowed me to try out all sorts of ideas in a short period of time, which tended to make the ideas come faster. I liked the underwater blue scene, so I tried another approach with Ghost - which is a nice idea but I didn’t love the execution. Similarly, Warm was okay but I did better versions of it later. Pounce feels like a bit of a departure for the series (to me at least), and Snub revisits another older design.
The tornadobellies offered a lot of opportunity for variation, and other people seemed to enjoy them too. This was a fun commissioned project, where I was hired to make a tornadobelly for each of the customer’s three sons.
She told me a bit about her kids, and I designed the canvases to flow from one into the other, while still functioning completely on their own. On the top of each canvas, I created a sigil to represent the recipient.
Commissions are fun, and I also appreciated that the small size of the canvases made it easy to create multiple versions of crowd-pleasing designs. Making prints is cool and all, but I enjoyed the ability to sell original copies of my own work.
Bizarro Belly is a natural consequence of working at a comic book store. A couple of different versions of Sick let me work with an unusual color palette, and an ickiness not typically associated with the tornadobellies. And Discovery is pretty much the opposite of that!
Projects like these ones - a pair called Hero and Villain, and the Godzilla-inspired Monster - are not exactly tornadobelly material. If you know what I mean. They were fun to paint, but they’re maybe not a natural fit for the series. My mind was starting to wander.
I still wanted to work of the four inch square canvases, but I was trying to force my ideas into the shape of a tornadobelly when there was no real need for me to do that! So I started to find other ways to use them.
This one is called Mostly. It’s completely covered with grey aliens. Well, mostly.
Then there’s this pretty lady. It’s called Sighing Flosser, and I put clues all over her dress in case you weren’t paying attention. I love her.
And who can forget the utensil trilogy: A Dork with a Spork, A Goon with a Spoon, and Your Wife with a Knife?
It should come as no particular surprise to anyone that my descent into pop-culture referencing began with Futurama. It’s one of the finest cartoons of all time, and a personal favorite. The first visit I paid to the year 3000 came with Meatbag Gone Wild, wherein Fry bears his nips after a long night of debauchery with Bender. Sploosh, right?
Then I wanted to experiment with the color scheme of painting fry inside the Horrible Gelatinous Blob, which was a pretty fun challenge.
Once the dam was broken, it wasn’t long before I hit upon the longest-running project, the Little Faces. A comic book store is a hotbed of enthusiastic geekery, and four inch canvases are quick to paint and easy to sell for really cheap. I wanted to find something that would be fun for me to make, that I could sell at a price-point people would appreciate, and that I could use to celebrate multiple aspects of the comic shop experience. The Little Faces were all of that.
Many comic book characters are easily identified by only that small amount of their face. Others may be less obvious on their own, but become unmistakable in context with other characters. Top members of the Avengers and the Justice League were easy to replicate, and I could even do multiple versions of characters who have more than one costume.
It was easy to paint backup copies of popular characters.
These little canvases also let me branch out into more obscure characters too, like Milk and Cheese, the Tick and Arthur, and Tank Girl.
Not that I was entirely finished doing other silly stuff.
I painted a unicorn and a rainbow, hanging out together in a basement man-cave with 1970s wood paneling on the walls and a shag carpet. And I even painted a newer, tinier version of my own comic book creation, Domestic Partner of Frankenstein.
But it was the Little Faces that people actually liked to buy.
There were commissions rolling in for the Little Faces too. Very specific Avengers or Justice League teams. Beta Ray Bill. Original Snoopy (the one where he has commas for eyes). Even the Muppets!
I used the canvases to decorate my shop with all the cartoons and fun stuff I loved. A couple of sets of Frylock, Master Shake and Meatwad from AquaTeen Hunger Force were well-received. A wobbly-brained Martian from Mars Attacks! was a nice way to inject some variety into the collection. And I couldn’t resist representing Venture Bros with the little faces of Doctor Girlfriend, the Monarch, and Brock Samson.
Painting Zim and Gir was a particular joy, but somebody bought them immediately. I had to paint another set to keep on the wall in the comic book store.
Maybe I’ll keep it really simple and paint four different faces at once, like the Futurama set. Or maybe I’ll let myself get carried away and pack a lot of contouring into that little square. Who’s gonna stop me, Sinestro? I doubt it!
Once all the obvious stuff was out of the way (Spider-Man and Batman and all), some of the fun came from choosing unlikely characters, and figuring out how to adapt them to the four inch canvas. There was no end in sight!
I suppose that what actually happened, now that I have travelled so far down this road, is that I moved. This is the point in the story where I moved across the country, back to Oregon, and all of my pursuits got suspended for a while.
When I finally got settled and started producing again, it was in different areas. I just never got back to the four inch form, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Collecting these far-flung photographs has been quite a memory walk; I had forgotten quite a few of these faces, and the simple face that I painted … a hundred of them? Two hundred? I don’t have pictures of all of them. There’s no way to ever know. But maybe I want to make some more.
Above: Mario and Luigi, the boys from South Park, Lumpy Space Princess, Jake the Dog and Finn the Human, Muscle Man and Benson, Hellboy, Wolverine, Ignignokt the Mooninite, and Deadpool.
One of my co-workers is a young woman who loves to paint. Her twenty-fourth birthday was coming up, and I was ordering some art supplies anyway, so I decided to get her a few of those four inch square canvases. That’s what originally got me waxing nostalgic about all these old paintings. Good times. Wee and nerdy times.