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On The Easel

The end of spring is rapidly approaching. That means it’s been a lot of garden time which is my favorite solace to recharge my batteries.

I mean.. look at this !

So painting has been a little slow, but I’m on the home stretch of the Undine painting. Really struggled with it for the first couple of weeks but I feel like it’s really beginning to come together and has really taught me a lot on bending the light around the forms.

Still have to do one more detail pass on the face and then the craziness that is going to be the water, but I’m super pleased with how most of the other elements are coming out.. except the reeds… the more look at them the more I want to wipe them out and just re-do them.. we’ll see.

Other than that, the store front re-work is coming along and I think it’s gonna be fine, but somehow I don’t think I’ll make it to my self imposed deadline of launching July 1.. which is kind of a bummer, but realistically there is just so much left to do.

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Stalling into Spring

Been an odd two weeks, but it finally seems like Spring has settled in… so that’ll be a nice months before the oven gets turned on high. So a bit of time has been spent in the weekends

Work on the next Undine painting is just about wrapped up with the drawing phase and I’m hoping to get it on board and ready to start painting this weekend.

But I have also finally gotten the store config issues worked out so I can keep populating all the products and get working on the print-on-demand along set up. And I need to test that it actually all works. So that’s a preeeety long list of todo’s this week… but also pretty exciting to see things coming together.

I could use a clone..

Because I also started a little series of dryad drawings. Figure if I make the drawings nice and on good paper they’d look nice framed and then after the Undine convert them to a series of small paintings. Trying to get comfortable working at multiple paintings at once and figuring out what I can do to maximize my number of paintings I create, I really don’t want to force myself to work faster and selectively looser.

So it’s gonna be a busy spring!

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Walking Backwards

Also known as backtracking. One of the benefits of understanding the process is that you know where you are in it, where you’ve been and where you’re going. This makes it easier to evaluate a piece at various stages of work.

And this week has been spent walking down a lot of dead ends, and then going back a step or two in the process to fix problems that are keeping the Undine I image from going as smoothly as I had hoped. On the other hand knowing when to stop, and backtrack and fix underlying issues instead of blundering ahead and hoping that the problems will go away by themself, is absolutely going to result in a stronger final image.

On a related note, a couple of us local artists tried to get some community involvement and see if we could get together and meet some other local creatives. But I guess fakebook just ate all my attempts at getting more people involved, which is a shame because it would be nice to see if we could develop a local artist community. So a not so fun step back there.. but one of them did mention another nearby town’s artist community so I guess that something.

Anyway I’m hoping to get the final drawing of Undine I done this week as well as the frame final glazes for Undine II.

Onward we journey.

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Finishing thoughts

I find that the end of a canvas is almost as hard as the beginning. When you start a piece there’s the fear of the blank canvas, and at the other end, it’s the end of the canvas, the last stroke, sticking a fork in it, calling it done.

It’s not a loud panic inducing fear, its more like the quiet fear of stepping away from it and saying it’s the best that I can do with this at this time. Pre-separation anxiety you could call it.

But then again, maybe it’s just me. Loads of artists don’t have a problem going back and reworking an old painting. I just can’t get myself to do that. When I finish a piece it’s a snapshot of where I am in a moment of time and what I’m trying to say at that point in time, and going back and re-working it well… fells wrongish.

(but boy is it tempting sometimes.. there’s some paintings that I know I could do it so much better now.)

Anyway, it took a bit but I wrapped up the Undine painting, and now I can’t wait to go and get started on the next one.

Good, but stressful week, all things considered.

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Trusting the process

If you ever spend much time time around an artist I’m sure you’ll hear them mumble ‘Trust the process damnit’ to themselves. But as a developing artist you quickly find yourself wondering “What Process?!!? How do I get a process that I can trust??!”

And if you take a course from an artist, or watch a bunch of YouTube or whatever process you can learn from, you’ll run across tons and TONS of artists who are more than happy to talk about ‘the right way to do X’. And if you’re like me, some of it will be amazing knowledge, and even more of it will be nonsense. Which brings us back to the whole process thing. What a lot of teachers try to teach you are their process, or the process of classical artists. That’s useful information, but what it doesn’t do is give you YOUR process.

Continue reading Trusting the process
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A quiet sea of change

It’s been a tumultuous year.. if you’re in the future just google it.

So yeah, lots of change.. especially at the end of summer, but it feels it’s been mostly good recently which is nice. So I’ve had time to do a bit of life reset and am finding having a renewed balance is paying off dividends. Pretty happy with the latest painting ‘Guardian of the forest’ and have recently been re-discovering the joy of playing with various mediums. Lately a bunch of ink and brush has been a fun go-to. The lack of control is a nice reminder to just let go and play sometimes… and unsurprisingly… practice makes..er well.. improvement but that’s nice to see too.

Turks Cap – ink and brush on paper

And then the stars aligned and I managed to get a spot in a kind of group mentorship program with one of my art heroes for a 10 month art intensive figure drawing group. Which means probably a bit light on the painting, but I’m already having a great time rediscovering the just joy of drawing and making marks with intent.

More soon.

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2017 – recap

2017 was a year of study, practice and experimenting with oils.  As such it really wasn’t a year where I had a whole lot to show for it with a couple of exceptions.

The first oil practice piece that I think wasn’t a total disaster. Was just a tiny little 3×5 scrap board

This  was what I’d call the first ‘successful’ Oil painting, ‘Gnome Home’. (18″x24″ Oil on canvas)

 

And a last minute Christmas present to a co-worker of their doggie.  (12″x12″ canvas acrylics)

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Working on many things

Boy did this year go whizzing by.  I’m hoping to finish up the year with one last acrylic painting. It isn’t looking like I’ll hit the 12 Paintings in a year that I hoped for.  On the other hand I did blow that goal out of the water if you measure it by surface area.  I was originally planning on 18×24 being the default size until I fell for the box 30x40s.

I’m still hoping to do all of next year in oils, but I may delay the start of that until the Jeff Miracola oil videos are launched, that would let me experiment a bit with acrylics before then.

Still having a hard time letting go of the feeling that everything has to be the most complete piece that pushes skills to the limit.  I may do a bit of a mini quickndirty Painting challenge.

But for now the end of the year looks to be coming fast and that has all sorts of repercussions to ‘free’ time.

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Long Live the Littles

Jude Little

 

Jude LittleFinished another painting,  tremendously happy with parts of it,  but I think I need to take a break from these larger pieces for a while.  It’s been very exciting to work big and loose but the surface area size and the quick drying time of acrylics are working against me at this point.  But on the upside, it really feels like that’s something that’s been hard to get to the point of noticing,until recently. That has to mean that I’m getting to the point of making the mental shift from working to just get paint onto canvas in the right spots to the point of having a feel for the paint itself and having the working time to execute the mental image.

And that, is an improvement artistically.

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Added a couple older paintings

Added 2 not so new (Nov & Dec 2015) paintings to the gallery.

I’m sure they’ll be replaced fairly soon as I hope to be cranking out newer and better pieces over the year.

The 2nd painting of the year (now almost a month behind schedule) is getting it’s final lines and color comp this week and Hopefully will be done shortly thereafter so I can catch up by the end of March.

web-dragonSlayer Offering to the Frog God

 

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Gestures – the halfway mark updates 9 and 10

And to wrap up the second week, updates 9 and 10.

Still working on getting the badges system put into the whole thirtydays.club sit, and defining the suggested ‘rules’   But essentially I’m leaning towards enforcing it to a minimum of 5 updates per 7 day period (ie work days only) so that will allow for weekends off or vacation etc.  Also you’ll be able to post images for the current 7 day period all at once, that discourages cheating and encourages returning to the site regularly.   Still need to look into scheduled emails, or a 1 click create a calendar entry to import to your ical or google calender, to help keep the user focused on the task.

figure-drawing-09

figure-drawing-10

 

Looking back to day 1, I can clearly see that the basic 1 minute gestures are feeling much more confident.

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Ah that post painting funk

Ok after a little breather It’s time to get back to working on things that are fun.  Finishing a painting is both exhilarating and exhausting and I find myself having to take a couple days and recoup my creative energy or I’ll find the need to go back and fix, and tweak and tweak irrisistable.  But taking a bit of time away lets me just be proud of what I’ve done and let it be.

After a couple days I had a little fun playing with skin rendering and trying to get a sense of translucency. One of the many attempts actually turned out to become this guy, which has a nice tone to it that I like.

sketch-45

 

Followed by a couple silly monsters following my son’s obsession with pokemon all of a sudden.

sketch46

 

And then this thing.. .. this might become a thing.. it’s still rough, but it’s speaking to me.  It started out as a perspective homework.. then became an epic skies homework.. and now it might be something else altogether..

songofthestorm-rough

 

On an art related note, I cracked some oil paints open for the first time in 7 years (it was a disaster then) and … holy cow…I’m loving them..

Something about the transparency and the need to go slow really just works for me.. maybe it’s because I’m getting older and not in as much of a hurry.  Not sure exactly what it is, but I’m doing some test pieces and maybe finishing/reworking the initial disastrous attempt and who knows maybe they’ll be worthy of showing on the inter-tron some day.

 

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Missed a few

Ok missed a few updates like updates 24-32.. they’re there, just not gotten around to posting them

However on sketch 32 this little guy popped out.

sketch-32

and then I decided he needed a chance to get a world to live in. And by 37 it was looking like this:

sketch-38

 

 

 

Then pulled in some rough textures and and blocked things in a bit more.
sketch-39

By update 40 the trees were looking flat and the overall color was beginning to be a bit washed out.
sketch-40

 

 

And that puts us here at update 41, time spent pushing back the stone some and final rendering of the character and more minor details.

Still need to touch up the bear, abird and pants, but we’re 99% there.

 

sketch-41