Am I finished?? I am not finished until I sign, and I don’t sign until the customer is happy. Is Lisa happy? More will be revealed. . .
I am happy. I am really happy! The hollyhocks and day lilies took out the Big Red Square feel of the painting, softened the edges, and livened it up. Lisa requested the chimney in spite of the fact that it does not show from this angle. That’s fine – I am her hired paintbrush, her humble servant. We also figured out how to put in the sailboat, once we figured out where the horizon line really belonged. Would you believe this lake is 3-1/2 miles wide?? That boat is waaaay out there!
Are you wondering what is going on with all this multiplication? Duplication? Triplication??
And finally, it is beginning to look detailed! There will be an extended drying session, because the shadows on the house are all wet. The next step is hollyhocks, lilies and geraniums, and they will go over the house, so it cannot be wet when I add those.
In addition to seeing Lisa’s Lake House, you can see I have several unfinished paintings and that I have painted the trim in the workshop a lovely teal. What you can’t see is that I poured teal paint on the floor while moving those telephone wires around. I think teal and brown are a beautiful combination, so the spots on the floor look okay to me. It’s a workshop, not a living room! (although sometimes it feels as if I live there. . .)
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?? I just turned my back for a sec, and look what happened on the easels! I think I’ll go lie down for a bit, maybe take an aspirin or find some chocolate.
“Why can I not notice that the wet paint shines until I put it in an email to you?? sigh. The shadows on the left side of the house are really darker, not shiny lighter!
“In other news:
1. The sky is repainted and the trees and distant lake shore are repaired.
2. the hosta bed is now painted
3. I added the barest tiniest hint of lake through the porch even though it squeezes the side of the house a bit.
4. The stump has more texture (white geraniums can’t happen until house is dry)
5. The shadows cast by the battens are straighter and more distinct (I’ll have to rephoto it when it is drier)
6. The windows are straighter and I added a bit of sunshine to the one on the far left (we’ll see how it looks dry).
6. The boulders are beginning to look like Minnesota rocks instead of rounded river rocks.
BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!
Leave these dadgum paintings alone in the workshop and they begin multiplying in the dark!
Lisa and I have been discussing the height of the horizon line. When I work from a combination of somewhat incomplete photos and a customer’s memory, there is a lot of explanation involved. It became necessary to thoroughly understand horizon lines and where they belong so that I could put this one in the right place, since it didn’t show in any photo.
Then, Lisa’s Mom’s friend (I could go and on and say her mom’s friend’s cousin’s neighbor’s brother-in-law’s sister, but it would be a made-up lie just to amuse myself) sent a photo with a (barely) visible horizon line.
This caused Lisa and me to rethink the placement of the horizon line in her painting. I lowered it, and then had to stop painting because it was too overcast and dark in the painting studio to mix any colors correctly or to see any detail. (You know how I love me some detail!)
Here is the painting with a lowered horizon line and nothing else changed since I last posted about the painting. (Had to take some time away for family stuff – not slacking off, just living life.)
When (if?) Lisa approves the new height, I’ll put the distant trees back in. Then I’ll patch up the roof and the trees from where the lake splashed over them.
As I was painting on this fifth pass over the canvas, the phone rang. I was between colors and just staring at the canvas, so contrary to my normal phone habits while painting, I answered.
The caller identified herself, and I was completely blank mentally. Completely. I realized that I was concentrating so much on the details of the painting that I felt as if I was at the lake in Minnesota. In addition to not putting down the brush, not interrupting the flow of thoughts is another reason to let the answering machine pick up while painting.
After showing Lisa step #4, she made a few requests and changes and additions. I paid attention, then put on my strongest magnifying glasses and went to work on the details of the distant lake line along with some other things. I LOVE detail. (Hmmm, I’ve mentioned this before, yes?)
Here is the latest pass over the canvas:
The lake was looking rather ocean-ish. Because I couldn’t see the horizon line in any of the photos, and Lisa asked me to open up the trees for a better view of the lake, I was just baffled as to what to do. (My normal thing is to bury stuff that I can’t see under growing things.)
Lisa sent me a video, taken while standing on her dock and slowly turning 360 degrees around the entire lake view. I watched that video numerous times, and then paused it and studied the distant shore line. Aha! So THAT’s how a lake shore looks at a distance. . .
The house and windows now have tighter detail. There needs to be more shadow on the house, but not as much as in the photo sitting at the base of the easel. I’ll work on that next.
I began “planting” things below the house on the left. When Lisa advises me as to whether or not these are believable, then I’ll either turn them into something else or continue. (Well, duh, Captain Obvious.)
Nope, not the fourth lake house of Lisa; it is the 4th pass across the canvas.
In my opinion, the sky, clouds, lake and trees are finished. However, my opinion is subject to change, and if I see something to improve, pass the paint brushes and step aside!
The roof, the porch and steps all seem finished to me, but Lisa has the final say.
I’ve resized and repositioned the windows until they finally look right. (or perhaps I have commission fatigue? Lake house fatigue? Lake house painting blindness syndrome?)
Lisa is enjoying watching her painting develop as this California (cabin) artist paints a Minnesota (lake) house. Apparently she isn’t squeamish. Because there is no one photo that says it all, she needs to be involved. For example, in most photos that she provided, the trees look very thick. But, she wants to see the lake and remembers how it looked when they had those trees thinned out for the lake view.
I sent her this photo after my third pass over the canvas.
The very tall tree on the right of the house is too tall for the width of its branches. I wanted to add much wider branches at the base. Lisa asked that I simply shrink the tree. It probably needs both things to happen.
As I looked through all the photos, some on paper and some on my computer, I saw a picture of the house that shows a tad bit more of the right side. It looked better to me, so I scooted things around a bit. I also increased the size of the windows to be more accurate and began adding detail to the porch area.
I love detail. I LOVE DETAIL. I LOVE DETAIL!
(Do you believe me?)
Lisa had asked me to remove one of the birches on the lower right. I did. She asked me to put it back. I will. I’m just easy to get along with that way. 😎
Let’s get through these decisions so I can get to the detail sooner – I can’t wait!!
Lisa reviewed the progress from painting session #1 and sent me some more information. It is rather astonishing to realize the amount of words and communication necessary to create a painting from someone else’s photos. There isn’t a single photo that says it all, so many photos with lots of explanation is the only way to understand it well enough to paint it.
Here it is after the 2nd painting session.
More paint to cover the orange (WHY do some artists think that it is good to paint the canvas orange? Furthermore, WHY did I listen to them??), evergreens thinned (fewer of them and fewer branches than before), horizon line raised (it didn’t show in the photos where the lake sort of peeked through the trees so I guessed, and guessed wrong)
I think the painting looks fairly good now if you view it from the back of a fast horse.
Lisa’s family has a lake house in Minnesota, somewhere northern and treed and lakey and gorgeous. She asked me to paint it.
After briefly considering a request to be flown there to see it with my own eyes, I came to my senses and said “Yes, of course I can work from your photos.”
(I have yet to find a customer who will fly me to her lake house in Michigan or Minnesota, family estate in South Africa or Brazil, beach house on Cape Cod or the Outer Banks, log home in Montana or Colorado, et cetera. What am I doing wrong here??)
Lisa wrote me some very thorough notes. We emailed often when she was at the lake house. She took photos. We spoke on the phone. We wrote a few more emails.
Then, I did a sketch for her.
We emailed a bit more. She mailed some more photos. I took copious notes.
Then, I primed a canvas in the orange that was already on my palette. Orange is in the middle of the dark to light spectrum, so it is rumored to be a good priming color.
I emailed her a photo similar to this and warned her not to be scared by the sloppiness. I’ve heard that watching a painting happen is similar to watching sausage being made. Couldn’t prove it by me; however, I do know that my paintings begin their lives looking a little loosey-goosey, sloppy-woppy, ugly-bugly.
Put on your rose-colored glasses, willya for Pete’s Sake?
“Sisters” took a long time to paint. The customer hired me because she liked my precision, and she gave me all the time necessary to complete this to both of our satisfaction.
When I paint, I listen to lots of things. There is music, podcasts, talk radio, books on tape, and voices in my head, including my own.
An aside: Someone said we should talk to ourselves the way we talk to our best friends. You know how sometimes you say things to yourself like, “How could you be so dumb?” (Maybe you don’t – please just play along for a moment. . .) If your best friend did something dumb, you’d be more likely to say, “That’s okay – stuff happens and we can learn from it.” Or, “Don’t worry about it – it is a small thing that can be fixed.”
This is what I have chosen to believe and follow:
I am a studio painter who works from photos.
Good paintings take a long time to finish.
Precision and accuracy are attractive.
I love detail.
Here are what the voices in my head have been saying, and here are my new responses in light of my recent decision (see the September 12 post):
VOICE #1 – “You are drawing with your paintbrush”.
Me – “So what?”
VOICE #2 – “If you paint standing up, you’ll paint with more energy.”
Me – “If my foot hurts, I will paint with more pain.”
VOICE #3 – “You need to listen to cool music while you paint, jazz or classical”.
Me – “This is a great time to listen to talk radio, podcasts about the business of art, interviews with artists and authors and inspirational speakers, sermons I’ve missed from my pastor, and audible books.”
VOICE#4 – “Real artists don’t paint from photos.”
Me – “Okay, I’ll be a fake artist.”
VOICE #5 – “You need to step back from your painting to see how it reads from a distance.”
My – “Thanks for the reminder. I am so into the detail that I forgot!”
Loves Cotton, Loves To Knit, oil on wrapped canvas, 8×8″, $100
