Variety in the Working Life of a Central California Artist

There you go, Search Engines. Hope you like that ridiculously long title.

I had a day of great variety, all of it interesting, all of it productive

  1. This book, Adventures in Boy Scouting, will soon be available as an ebook through Bookbaby. It took a lot of learning, and a lot of proofreading. The print version is available at the Three Rivers Mercantile, Three Rivers Historical Museum, and BookBaby.com. 
  2. After enjoying the nice fire in the house (in the wood stove—no need to be concerned) while proofreading (we had a few cold days), I moved to the painting workshop to do a bit of polishing on the Fiftieth Bouquet oil painting. “Polishing” here means making some small corrections. The roses, red bow, vase, coaster and background are not finished.
  3. I detailed the mountains and put a second layer on my favorite scene.

  4. Then I left the painting workshop and moved into the studio to finish a drawing. After scanning it, I sent it to the customer to get her approval before spray-fixing it and then adding color.

It was a good day of working on projects that are all presold. While it is fun to just paint and draw what I want, it is more satisfying to paint and draw for other people, particularly when they choose subjects that float my boat.

In case you have forgotten because I haven’t shouted this at you for awhile:

Using pencils, oil paint, and murals, I make art that you can understand, of places and things you love, for prices that won’t scare you.

 

A Special Commission

If you have followed this blog for awhile, you may have noticed that I have a slight touch of a Cat Disorder. Nothing crazy. Trail Guy brings sensibility into my life, so we only have 3 cats. (We’ve had as many as 8, but that was short lived.)

Some dear friends who live far away have an unusually personable cat named Zelda. They sent a few photos, and I put all jobs aside to work on this one.

Everything else had to wait.

 

ONE MORE THING:

BOOK SIGNING SUNDAY, APRIL 24, THREE RIVERS HISTORICAL MUSEUM, NOON-4 PM. I will be joining Bob Kellogg as he signs his book “Adventures in Boy Scouting: Tales by the Old Scoutmaster”.

Attending to Other Jobs

When I began these paintings, navels were still hanging on trees, and the blossoms began. Orange blossoms are my favorite scent. Suddenly, orange blossom season was almost over, and I hadn’t touched these 2 small paintings.


They are now available at the Mural Gallery in Exeter. 6×6″, $60; 4×6″, $50 (PLUS TAX, OF COURSE!) The Mural Gallery doesn’t have a website; it is at the park with Exeter’s first mural, next door to the Wildflower Cafe.

Speaking of Exeter’s first mural, here is the beginnings of a similar painting, another painting of my favorite subject.

This one will be fun. It is a commission, and I know I can do it because I painted the same scene a few years ago as a 16×20″. Or maybe 18×24″. I’ve slept since then (and painted many similar scenes).

P.S. The paintings are NOT scratch ‘n’ sniff.

Those Flowers Smell Like Oil Paint

Those flowers smell like oil paint because that is what they are made out of. 

This is a fun project, unlike anything I have ever painted before. I have painted individual flowers on 6×6″ canvases, but never a 16×20″ bouquet, with all its tangled and overlapping pieces. I am also just making up the background, intending to adjust the darks and lights to best show off the flowers. (A 50th wedding anniversary bouquet, commissioned as a painting so it will last forever.)

Background first.

Find where the ribbons might be draping. Since there is red on the brush, work on the carnations.

 

Keep working on the carnations, fill in more greenery, dab a few more baby’s breath, add the white ribbons hanging from the white roses.

Better.

Now I can see that the bouquet is slightly weighted toward the left side.

I took out a leaf on the lower left, but I don’t think that was enough.

This is better. I erased more of the lower left leaves, added another leaf to the upper right (smallish, beneath the top rose and to the right), fixed some other weird leaves, and added a bit more curly willow to the upper right.

Everything will need another layer or two or even three.

 

Building a Bouquet With Oil Paint

Yesterday you were left with this cliff hanger:

Beginning the detail on the roses required some intense study, because my brain says, “White rose”, but my eyes say, “There are shadows which allow you to discern the individual petals—what colors are those shadows?” (Do your eyes talk to you?)

The main bouquet photo is on my laptop, so I am able to enlarge it hugely and study the photo.

The shadows are appearing to have a yellow base in this rose. 

How about this one?

Grayer than the other but still with cream undertones, so this also will have some yellow.

Time to start drawing with my paint brush.

The roses got difficult (everything is difficult – get used to it, Central California Artist), so I started experimenting with the carnations.

It was fun to jump around – a few carnations, a little more around the roses to make them pop out, some leaves, a touch of baby’s breath.

After waiting a couple of days for the white to be drier (white dries the slowest of all the paint colors), I could see that the upper rose was too large. Using a dark background color, I trimmed the upper rose to a better size.

You probably can’t even tell the difference. I can and it looks better. I don’t have to match the photo exactly (good thing—that just isn’t possible) but I do have to make this be the most believably beautiful bouquet ever.

Fifty Years

Mr. and Mrs. Customer had their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Mr. Customer sent Mrs. Customer a bouquet of 50 red carnations with 2 white roses. Mrs. Customer wanted it to last forever, so they asked me to paint it for them.

They emailed me photos, and then I experimented with various methods of cropping. 

I realized that the color in the photos wasn’t telling the whole story so I asked if I could go photograph the flowers in person. I took along some paint samples in order to match the right reds, my camera for a few close-ups (although the roses were drooping), and my computer so they could see the ways I had cropped. I also asked questions to learn what parts were important to them: the background realistic like their home interior or just whatever shows off the flowers? the vase? the coaster the vase is sitting on? as many flowers as I can cram into the painting?

This is going to be complicated and slow, because I will be working from multiple photos. I don’t want it to look like just any bouquet of flowers—it needs to be as special as these people. So, it will take time and thought, enormous detail, and a willingness to make adjustments that enhance the painting rather than slavishly copying a photo.

Enough jibber-jabber.

Start upside down. Make some blobs, get them to roughly correspond to the arrangement in the photos because a professional flower arranger knew what she was doing (and I don’t).

Right side up, add some background, resize things to better fill the canvas, correct the vase shape, include the ribbon.

Lift out places for curly willow, begin shaping the outer edges, cover the surface, start indicating some darks and lights within the carnations.

This is a little bit too hard for me, but not as hard as drawing a 1-3/4″ face from a little photo. I had to take a break and go pull some weeds.

Mr. Customer said they’d like it sometime before their second fiftieth. I can accommodate that request.

A Few More Orange Groves in Paint

Here is the rest of your tour through Tulare County’s finest scenery, as interpreted in oil paint.

This was a commission, the very first time I painted a citrus grove with hills in the background.

In the Orchard (sold)

Tulare County’s Best (24×24″, available, $1000)

This was a thank you gift so it didn’t need a name.

Citrus Sunset (sold)

 

This was a commission.

Another commission.

 

And the latest with the appropriate title of “Citrus and the Sierra”.

Citrus and the Sierra, 10×20″, oil on wrapped canvas, $350 (plus tax if you live in California)

P.S. I thought this piece was spoken for, but I didn’t put the size on it and the intended customer’s intended wall is not wide enough.

 

 

Crying “Uncle” and Throwing in the Towel

The agreement with my customer M was that I would try to capture a likeness in her Dad’s face. If I was unable to do that, we would understand and accept that this job is beyond my ability. It is EXACTLY the kind of drawing job that I have struggled with for many years, and finally decided to stop accepting commissions for.

BUT, M is my friend and a great communicator, and I want to please her. I also like testing myself from time to time to see if I have improved.

Attempt # 3 was a reject.

Attempt #4 was a reject.

Attempt #5 was sent to M with this: “If this one isn’t right, then I am crying “uncle”, accepting the fact that this is beyond my ability, and throwing in the towel. (Jeopardy music in the background as the drawing awaits its fate. . .)”

I recognized that I was falling into the trap of trying to do the impossible. I thought that I had chosen a large enough piece of paper to include the whole scene with faces large enough to draw, but I was wrong. The most minute change, a slight dab of the eraser, half a pencil point width change, using HB instead H or H instead of 3H (those are pencil hardness/darkness indicators), a vague variation in paper texture. . . all I am doing is tickling the paper and hoping something works. 

So, for once in my career of accepting challenges that are beyond my ability to execute well in a manner that pleases the customer, I am willing to quit on this one and STOP SAYING YES TO THESE TYPES OF COMMISSIONS.

Nope. Didn’t look like M’s dad. Bye-bye, drawing.

P.S. M, it is not your fault. It is mine for saying yes when I knew better. Thank you for your patience and for the opportunity to try one more time and then finally accept reality.

See? I have tried and tried and tried with these tiny faces in the past:

More Can’t See ‘Ems  This one worked because the customer didn’t know the people personally.

Custom Pencil Drawings Another one where the customer said a likeness wasn’t necessary.

P.S. I didn’t cry. It is just a figure of speech. Thank you for your concern.

 

 

Eensy Forward Motion

As I struggle along on this pencil drawing commission of faces that are too small for me to capture a likeness, you get to see the progress.

This is the original photo.

This is my first attempt at capturing M’s Dad accurately.

This is a scanned and enlarged version of the faces.

Here is the second version of my drawing.

And finally, so you will understand what I am working with, here is the drawing with a ruler.

Phooey. The inch marks don’t show.  M’s dad’s face is 1-3/4″ high. That’s all.

That’s all I can stand of this today. I will go pull some weeds, because that doesn’t require perfection.