I made some cave paintings

Well, perhaps they aren't quite cave paintings, but a few weeks ago I was riding around on my scooter and noticed some graffiti tagged on a small bridge near my house. Ever since I was a little kid this bridge has had stupid things painted on and under it from white supremacist stuff to the usual crude pictures of wangs and cuss words a 12 year old who raided his dad's garage for a can of Krylon might get the urge to paint. It's always gotten on my nerves when I'd go by under the bridge and see all of that, and when I saw some of this on the top side of the bridge going by it sparked my interest in cleaning it all up some.

I started out just spraying white over the tag on the top of the bridge, but decided to use my day off to go ahead and paint over the junk under as well with some old paint I got free on craigslist. I loaded up the scooter and got to work white washing over phrases such as "yo daddy suck ass" and as I did so with a few different colors paredolia kicked in and I decided to make the blobbed over shapes in the paint into something (hopefully) more attractive.

I started out with one large splotch of blue that looked something like a big blue bird. I added detail to the head and came back to add the beak and whites of the eyes when I would switch paints. I also added a big tree next to it once I painted over something vertical next to it with brown.

There were seveal other things I made into paintings, including a night skyline that I'm happy with the results and detail of considering I was teetering on rocks the whole time, was using a 2" brush, and was only working with four colors. Even with all this though there were still many areas as you can see where all I did was basically paint over whatever offending remark was there. I did leave one original bit of paint that simply said "Hello"; under it I pained "HI" with a smiley face.

















The cool thing is now for the first time I have something more interesting to look at any time I ride under the bridge and even though it's still graffiti I think it's a huge step up from what was previously under there. Here's to hoping it'll either be left alone or improved upon and not just mindlessly tagged over. The real question with all of this is does all this painting make me an arteest yet?