Category: commissions

Pre-Christmas Gift

Someone I have never met contacted me to draw a house I’ve never seen. When I received the photo, I marked it with colored circles, and sent an email asking for closer photos or descriptions of what each circle contained.

The customer was very responsive, and sent helpful photos of each area. This was on a tight deadline, and silly me, I forgot to mention the rush charge. I also didn’t save the detail photos of each area of mystery, because space on my laptop is limited.

You can see that the photo was taken with a phone, using the built-in wide-angle lens. This distorts things – the verticals aren’t vertical, and distant things look farther away while closer things appear too big.

Time was fleeing quickly, so I just dove in. Often if I draw the parts I can see and understand, then the other parts aren’t so daunting and can be faked somewhat.

Thanks to great communication with the customer, I was able to finish the drawing well ahead of the requested date and also get good instructions about the parts that the original photo didn’t explain.

P.S. I love to draw!

Hard House

After Christmas I will show you all the commissions that have to remain a secret until the gifts have been given from my customers to their people.

Having met the tight deadlines of all the custom art, I returned to the paintings without deadlines. Remember the house painting?

So hard. So very hard. The photos. Yikes. (Would I like some cheese with that whine? perhaps – what have you got?)

Okay, put on your big girl breeches and git ‘er dun.

I sent this photo to the customer to tell her this is the best I can dig out of the photos and when it dries a bit, I’ll tighten up some of the detail.

She said, “Perfect!” (really??) and sent me this photo:

Umm, what?

There is a basket of fuschias hanging behind the people. I told her that I can’t tell where this is, and she answered, “The porch”. I said where on the porch? She sent me this and said, “Where I put the white spots”.

I enjoy communicating with my customers in a variety of creative ways. Really makes me smile!

When it dries, I’ll add the fuschia baskets and tighten up what detail I can see. I think the floor of the porch is brick rather than concrete, so that will need to be changed. There was a tree in the front lawn, but it would hide the gable end if I added it. I’ll make better leaves on the front shrub, brighten the grass, make the porch pillars better, and the window frames too.

I wish she had asked for a pencil drawing.

So, I worked on something fun in order to take the edge off. I’ll show you tomorrow.

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):

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.
Black animals are extremely hard to photograph and thus to draw; seeing details is almost impossible.
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.
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.)
There is still time to have your pet drawn, but there will be a rush charge.

commissioned pencil drawing pencil drawing

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!)

pencil pencil drawing

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.

Squeezing in Oranges

oil paintings orange oil paintings orange paintings

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.

More before, but it was too dark to get a decent photo of the after version on this section.

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).

cabin drawing pencil pencil cabin drawing

Snowy Sequoias, finished!

The pair of trees in the middle needed detailing next.

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. . .