Ornaments for Friends

A friend asked me to paint her little dogs on an ornament. Of course they were the little lapdogs of undetermined ancestry who often wear clothing and cause me to stifle a scream while looking for a chair to stand on. I am a very understanding person, and I understand that a photograph of a dog is not a rodent seeking a pantleg to climb. And all custom art is a chance to learn new skills and to practice pleasing customers.

I didn’t save any photos to show you because I didn’t want to encourage any more jobs like this. The dog photos were blurry and it was crazy difficult. The saving grace was that my friend was pleased, which was the point of the whole exercise.

Meanwhile, another friend (same social group) asked for a similar custom ornament. When she told me what she wanted on the ornament, my head may have spun around a couple of times as I said, “You want WHAT??”

This one I painted at the dining table instead of the painting workshop, so I could prop my elbows on the table for support while painting these tiny subjects.

I charge $75 per ornament, which might work out to about $12 an hour.

SOMEBODY STOP ME, PLEASE!

P.S. I have purposely not added any “tags” to this blog post so that no one can find me on a search for custom ornaments. I only go through these difficult exercises for friends. No, there isn’t enough time for another one this year. Well, maybe, but they now cost $150 each. No, $1500. How about $15,000?

 

Custom Dogs

Many artists get their start in custom work by drawing or paintings people’s pets. My start came with architecture, specifically cabins. “Cabinart” – get it? 

Occasionally I get commissioned to draw or paint people’s pets, more dogs than cats. Here is the most recent, shown here today because I feel fairly confident that the intended recipient doesn’t know about me or this blog.

Just for curiosity’s sake, have a look at a few previous custom dog drawings:

In case you are wondering, here is information about custom dog drawings (cats too):

  1. Being eye-level with the animal makes for better photos than looking down at them. Notice the difference between the top drawing and the lower three.
  2. Black animals are extremely hard to photograph and thus to draw; seeing details is almost impossible.
  3. Clothing on animals is just weird; I have no earthly idea what the various parts and pieces of clothing are on the top drawing, and the less I understand what I am seeing, the more difficult it is to draw it.
  4. Usually people want little lap dogs of undetermined ancestry, the type of dog that makes me want to scream while standing on a chair. I manage to keep my panic at bay while armed with pencils. (German Shepherds, Australian Shepherds and yellow Labradors are more my style, although cats will always be my preference.)
  5. There is still time to have your pet drawn, but there will be a rush charge.

Rush Drawing Commission

The custom art jobs are slowly getting completed. Many of them cannot be shown, because the recipients might be readers of this blog. Can’t be giving away secrets like that just before Christmas!

This is a drawing that the recipient has already received. It began with some sketches.

The customer didn’t want these subjects shown this way. (Why did they – customer and assistant – send me these photos to work from??)

I tried again from the photos they specified out of the batches they had sent to me. (Often multiple photos help me see details that might be obstructed by shade or trees or trash cans or cars or. . .)

This was accepted, but the customer requested that the upper left image not be on a tilt.

It was a rush job, so I spent all day on a Saturday and a few hours on Sunday completing the drawing.

The upper right scene was drawn from another rush job for the same customer several years ago.

P.S. This was a very challenging job, causing me to rethink my custom prices and available sizes for collages. I know for sure now that 9×12″ is too small for this amount of detail (BRICKS – oy vey!)

In Case You Were Wondering.

In case you are wondering about the mural in progress at St. Anthony’s, I have set it aside (figuratively speaking) until I have finished the custom art jobs. The mural doesn’t have a deadline; the other jobs do.

In case you are wondering why I am not showing you more custom jobs, it is because they are gifts for people, and I can keep secrets.

More will be revealed in the fullness of time. Tomorrow I’ll begin showing you a few of the commissions that the recipients won’t see on my blog because they don’t read it or even know about me.

Mural, Day Eleven

On Day Eleven, I arrived when the sun was bright on the wall. It was difficult painting. The worst part is that my brush dries when I step back to view my work or contemplate my next move. If I toss the brush in the water bucket, then it is too drippy to use again and takes awhile to shake out. If I don’t toss it in the bucket, it goes solid. (So get another brush! But if I did that each time I stepped back, it would take me an hour at the end of a painting session to wash them all.)

Everything has trade-offs. The good side of bright sun on the wall is that it makes for better photos.

A list of work remaining: too much blue sky needs branches, more ferns at the bottom, background behind the tree to the right of the arch, more white fir trees in the foreground (the little bluish tree to the right of the far left tree), one of those medium trees gets too narrow too fast at the top, and I could keep going, but it is time to paint.

Before
After
More before, but it was too dark to get a decent photo of the after version on this section.
Before
After
This is an example of that blue sky that wants branches. It will have to just wait awhile.

Plenty of detailing remains undone; I could work on perfecting things for days. Instead, I need to return to custom artwork with tight deadlines. St. Anthony’s Retreat is very flexible and have no deadline in mind for the mural.

This is the end of Day Eleven. I will spend some time studying the mural and then do my best to finish it in one more day of painting. “One more day”, not because anyone is pressuring me, but because I think the end is that close.

That probably means two more days. I want to keep drawing with my paintbrushes.

Three Delivered Pencil Drawings

A thoughtful and generous man hired me to draw 5 cabins for 5 different friends who lost them in the wildfires. He asked me to not put them on the blog, because they were to be surprises. He must think that I have a larger readership than I do; on the other hand, this is Tulare County, where there aren’t 6 degrees of separation – it is more like 1-1/2.

Three of the drawings have been delivered. The customer sent me photos of the recipients, but because this is the World Wide Web, I’ll just show you the cabin drawings without the recipients (even though some are wearing masks). 

Snowy Sequoias, finished!

The top edge needed paint.
The pair of trees in the middle needed detailing next.
See? not enough detail.
Then, instead of working on the trees themselves, I worked on the snow. White is the slowest color to dry in oil paint, so it needed a head start.

I skipped showing you all the in-between steps. They were this: snow on the ground, tree details, more snow on the trees, details on the few upper branches, more detailing on the trees, sign, and then. . .

. . . I flipped it upside down! Why?

Because the bottom needed painting. 

Then I moved it into the dining room to dry.

When it was dry, I carried it outside to photograph in the daylight.

Hi Tucker. Thanks for stopping by.

Wowsa. I feel mighty proud (and relieved).

Trail Guy and I spent an hour building a make-shift, patchworked, DBO box to protect it on its journey.

This is the fancy pick-em-up truck, not the Botmobile. 

Today I will deliver the giant commissioned oil painting of Sequoia trees in snow, and it will feel great to hand it over.

Math Accident

I couldn’t figure out why the giant oil painting of sequoias in snow was taking so long. The answer is that I had a math accident. 

The customer decided on 18×36″, and I agreed that I could finish it in the time needed, although it would be quite tight.

I painted and painted, each morning before heading to work on the mural in the afternoon, some mornings before teaching drawing lessons in Exeter, mornings before my business referral group Zoom meeting. It seemed that I wasn’t making much progress in each session. Although I got areas finished, they were a smaller percentage of the entire painting than I expected to cover.

One day, I was looking over my inventory list, adding and numbering new jobs (have I mentioned how much work I have?) and I noticed that the canvas of sunny sequoias, which I converted to the snowy sequoia painting, was listed as being 24×48″.

I got the tape measure out, and sure enough, instead of painting 18×36″, I am painting 24×48″.

24×48″?

Yeppers.

Ridiculous math accident.

And that is why I have to stand on a ladder to paint the top edge.

My customer was extraordinarily gracious and understanding.  We spent a fair amount of time laughing together on the phone about the situation, and then he told me to adjust my price to reflect the true value of the painting!

His company has plans to reproduce it in several formats, and it will still work because the proportions are the same as 18×36. Because it is larger, I am able to achieve tighter and better detail. So, it is all turning out better than planned or imagined.

More Snowy Sequoias

November is the busiest month in my business. This year is busier than ever, and there aren’t even any boutiques or festivals. It is so fun to have more projects than I can even show you. Here is the progress on the snowy sequoia oil painting commission. It is several days worth of painting.

The background will only need one more pass of detailing. There is still quite a bit of work left, which was puzzling to me. Why is this painting taking me so long? It feels as if I should be covering more territory in each painting session, but instead, I am inching along.

I’ll tell you why this is on Friday after a bit more time to process the ridiculousness of this situation.