Mike Lyon

Painting Drawing Printmaking Japanese Woodblock Printing Furniture Lighting

43 x 27 inch acrylic on BFK painting (self portrait improved)

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This painting in acrylics on BFK paper went through several states and many weeks before arriving at an acceptable result.  Here’s the final state of the painting: BFK is a very soft paper — because the tip of the flow-pen actually touches the surface, the paper becomes abraded (deeply abraded) as the tip repeatedly passes […]

54 x 29 inch gesture painting (self portrait)

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Another ‘gesture’ painting — this one uses the same gesture character set as my earlier (and smaller) airbrushed “Jim”, but the gestures are slightly larger (1/4 inch squares) and are painted using the Paasche Flow Pencil, so the tip touches the paper. It’s painted on Rives BFK, so the paper surface has been abraded quite […]

Painting with Paasche Flow Pencil

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I’m working on a short series of painted self-portraits at the moment. I’ve mounted a Paasche Flow Pencil (very much like an airbrush, only without the air — the ‘nozzle’ is conical and a needle valve seats in the nozzle in order to control the flow of paint. The Paasche is not a very high-precision […]

“Jim” acrylic gesture grid painting on Rives BFK 42 x 24 inches

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Today I completed a second painting of “Jim” using the 16-value geometric gestures from the previous attempt, but scaled down so that each is 0.2 inches square, producing an image about 40 inches high by 22 inches wide. The 200 x 120 gesture grid (24,000 squares) was painted more than six times using four colors […]

Backsliding… “Jim” painting 80 x 44 inches (image area) — a colorful MESS

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Yesterday (February 13, 2007) I completed a first LARGE painting using an airbrush mounted on my CNC machine to paint 22,000 0.4 inch squares (200 x 110 squares) in four transparent colors on Rives BFK paper. One of 17 simple shapes designed to produce tone in even steps from lightest to darkest was painted in […]

computer controlled airbrush gizmo complete

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Jan 22, 2007: Computer controlled paintbrush gizmo up and running as of 30 minutes ago!!! Parts for airbrush assembly – the airbrush itself is just above the angle iron with the solenoid already installed. Solenoid plunger above it, little bent aluminum airbrush retaining clips above airbrush – the angle iron gets bolted into the aluminum […]