Just before the dreaded Covid 19 appeared and took over the planet I got involved in the donut business with my son. Sasquatch Donuts in Port Angeles, Wa. We bought an existing donut place that wasn’t doing well and set about making the donuts great … and just 2 months in the Covid thing happened. Frigg’n timing sucked. I ended up working there doing customer service, which was NOT the original plan. Did it until the end of September 2022, which btw I can say was so far overall the worst and hardest year of my life, and because most people around me happened to have been very self-absorbed and self-centered in general I had no back. Oh how frigg’n fun. (That was sarcasm) Anyways… my customer service experience gave me a new appreciation for those who do that work, but I’m sticking to art. Sliding into 2023 I am not connected with Sasquatch Donuts at all. I signed over all my share of ownership to my son in 2022 and am out of there. I do still love donuts though. Just eating them, not selling… and I much prefer the freshly made real deal than the bulk frozen months old thawed out crud they sell in the bakeries of the large grocery stores and the like.
My reason for this donut blabber is more to do with sasquatch as a brand. I live in the Pacific Northwest and Sasquatch is a big thing here. Sasquatch Donuts is a cool thing.
and…
This is the first sasquatch tattoo I’ve done since leaving sasquatch donuts.
It is a small tattoo, just 4″ in height. The inside is a Pacific Northwest theme meant to represent this area. The guy who got it was from here, but lives elsewhere now. A homage to his hometown of Port Angeles and the surrounding area. Hills, trees, mountains, an exaggerated version of a particular type of night sky we sometimes get her, and just to make sure everyone knows it (and sasquatch) are a super serious subject we included a tiny cartoonish spaceship.
So, that is the end of this post. If you ever go sasquatch hunting in the PNW watch out for aliens. We’ve got those as well.
Shot through the heart… love is the bearer of the most brutal of arrows. It comes from nowhere, takes us unawares, ensnares us, and sometimes takes root to begin growing. Like all things that grow, that live… it is unstable and requires very specific things to thrive. It must thrive and grow in certain ways too, equally… for if one side withers it takes it all down. Ah, love. Let that seed grow and take root in your heart and eventually, it must end. All things of this world end.
Anyways… this was a quick ink sketch on a 9″ high X 12″ wide piece of thick-ish paper that I decided to treat to a bit of acrylic paint and a tad of watercolor. It ended up mostly acrylic paint with very little ink or watercolor showing.
Ending the year with this simple ink sketch… just because.
Ink sketch about 7″ tall I’d guess.
Fiddled with a filter and got this….
and that is all I’ve got for you.
Hopefully 2023 will be a great year for the creatures that inhabit this earth. I wish you all the awesomeness of better years and better times. No matter if your 2022 was kick-ass groovy or pure crud, a better year is always a hope.
Not really a title to this, but had to call it something. Dream.
It is a 16″ x 20″ canvas painted with acrylic in a style that mixes my expressionistic painting with old-school traditional American tattoo art. I did this as a test… testing myself actually to see if I could do what I wanted. It is a portrait of a girl named Sydney who is pretty much the only person who can seem to put up with me on a long-term basis without wanting to choke me, shoot me, beat me with a bat, etc. The test was to see if I could mix the painting and design styles in a portrait of a specific person.
The canvas I used was basically the only one of the size I wanted which was around, and I’d already put the background on it for a different painting. I’d have gone with a more fleshy type deal that matched her skin tones if starting from scratch, but I was too lazy to paint over what I’d previously done. Add to that I kinda dug the background. My next attempt at this will be different because of that. Overall it came out pretty good. Good for my goals that is. The idea is possibly to offer such a thing with a few catches as an art project. We will see if I am into it after doing a few.
As for this one… Dream… upon starts and with luck. Lucky dreams. That is the theme subject-wise, and the style is already explained.
How do we solve the puzzle once the pieces are lost?
A small ink-on-paper piece that originated with the idea of realizing or knowing too much and not wanting to know or believe because it was possibly a hallucination, but it seemed too real to not be the truth. Took to much was not my idea of a title for this little drawing, but as I was about to upload this I saw a meme that said “took too much” and had a cat with a bunch of catnip spazzing out so I went with it. The internet changes all. This was drawn on a regular piece of 8.5″ x 11″ copy paper with a Pigma micron pen. The original shall see the garbage while prints shall live on.
You can get little prints of this sweet ass ink drawing HERE.
and… You can get this kick-ass design as a sticker HERE. I am recommending stickers for everyone because it is a trippy design and stickers are not costly so I know you can afford them. This is the perfect deal, you get a sticker, everyone who sees it thinks it is kick-ass, tells you how amazing your taste is, asks where you got the sticker, you tell them to check out AARRON.COM or google Aarron Laidig (mention the two As & two Rs) so they can check out my visual shenanigans…. and BAM! You are now like a superhero to them all because you purchased a sticker which eventually lead to them finding my art, and…. it changed their life.
Funny add on for you. As you are very aware I don’t use spell check or anything of the sort on this blog. I type fast and make a mess. I like it that way. I do use such things when creating forms and corresponding with gallery administrators or other types where it could harm me if I fail to re-read what I wrote before hitting send or submit. I even have a copy of Grammarly running in the background for such instances. Well… I forgot to shut it off. I’ve currently half a dozen tabs open with my sporadic babble on them and Grammarly is having a fit I think. It wants me to change every other word I wrote. Humor. I’m leaving my mess as is.
Did I mention you should get a sticker? You can do that HERE if you’d like.
Constitutions uncaffeinated with feet and hummingbird is my amazingly lame title for this surrealistic charcoal sketch which was conceived in dreamland via lack of caffeine in my system I am guessing. Don’t lie to me and claim you’ve never had dreams centered around hummingbirds and a girl’s feet though… I know you probably have so I think this is some good art for you.
Little prints, stickers, cups, shirts, etc. are available HERE.
Sketch vs drawing…. for me a sketch has usually been something little time is involved in. So in a case like this where it should have been a ten-minute sketch, but turns into a hour-long process it makes me feel like it is a drawing kinda. Only kinda though. It is on random paper rather than quality art paper. It is not cleaned up, and is very much a first draft. It is basically a fancied version of my rough sketches. The charcoal at hand was used, I had a broken Pentalic soft stick and a General’s hard charcoal pencil. Less than fifteen feet away a bag in a drawer contained multiple types of charcoal. I never thought to get it and refine things. It was and is a sketch. Size, materials, substrate, and time make is so. If it were to become a “drawing” in the finished sense it would have required either a bunch of refining at the bare minimum, but in my case it also would have required me getting a sheet of archival paper and setting up with proper charcoals… instead of whatever and a piece of a fast food napkin to blend. Anyways, I like sketches. This one is fun.
Artistic Flow is my (Aarron Laidig's) personal art blog. This is not my catalog or one of my studio pages.
If you are seeking my art catalog it is located here.
I no longer maintain a section or site devoted to my photography, but if you know my work and wish to inquire please feel free to contact me via my contact form.
