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.

 

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.

Back to Sawtooth

Remember all those oil paintings of Sawtooth Near Sunnypoint? Sunnypoint was a Forest Service campground in Mineral King closed in the 1970s (or was it the 1960s? I wasn’t there then.)

The view that has been so popular is a bit made up. When you are standing where I have stood to take so many photos, year after year, of the same scene, your eyes tell you that the barest tip of Sawtooth shows. When you leave the exact spot, you remember it as a place where Sawtooth, Black Wolf Falls, the stream, and wildflowers are all coexisting in beautiful harmony.

It is my job to gather up all those pieces of reality and combine them into a believable fantasy for you. This beautiful fantasy, which matches up with peoples’ memories, has brought me back to the easel once again.

After a week of messing around, taking walks, editing 2 books, and staying away from the painting workshop, I finally went back to work.

The work that remains after this dries:

  1. Add the wildflowers
  2. Fix whatever is wrong that I have noticed during the drying process
  3. Sign
  4. Let dry again
  5. Scan
  6. Varnish
  7. DELIVER!

There is more to the story of multiple iterations of the Sawtooth Near Sunnypoint paintings. Mañana. . .

Sales, as Opposed to Tech Troubles

The year started in a somewhat ignominious manner with tech troubles. That stuff is quite alarming, upsetting, and interruptive. I combat this by reviewing all the sales in the previous month (necessary to pay for all the tech repairs, and I am sorry to report that no fat lady has sung yet).

I had sales through Kaweah Arts, the Mural Gallery, Exeter’s Courthouse Gallery, along with commissions. All is not lost – let’s rejoice together!

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE! Tune in tomorrow, same Bat time, same Bat channel.

P.S. Happy Birthday to Trail Guy!

Last Oil Commission of the Year

On December 31, it was cold and gray outside. This meant it would take awhile to get heat up near the easels in the painting workshop, so I chose to paint inside the house. 

The lady from Spain who bought a poppy and requested an orange and a pomegranate to match extended her stay here. (Clearly, she is liking our subject matter.) This meant there was enough time for me to paint a pomegranate. It made me wish I could get the orange painting back in order to touch it up, assign an inventory number, and scan it. (I painted the orange in a day while sitting at the Courthouse Gallery.)

It has a few days to dry before it is ready to be scanned and delivered. 

It is very pleasant to paint in the house – I sit at the dining table instead of standing at the easels. The room is warm, Trail Guy is hanging around, Pippin is in the living room (under strict rules), there are tunes. Yes, I can have tunes in the painting workshop but I generally listen to podcasts instead. Maybe I’ll get my hard-nosed work face in place a little later in the new year. But for now, this is my preference. 

Thank you, Señora España, for choosing the art of this Central California artist!

That Was Quick

On Friday I delivered some notecard packages to the Mural Gallery in Exeter. Manager Cindy told me of good sales of paintings there and said someone bought an 8×8″ oil painting of a poppy. That someone also requested the same size of an orange and another of a pomegranate. I asked a few questions, then went off to the Courthouse Gallery for a day of gallery-sitting and painting.

A little later, I heard from Cindy that the customer is from Barcelona, Spain, and will be returning there shortly after Christmas. That’s cutting things a little close, especially since I may not be going back down the hill before then.

When I looked in my crate of supplies, I saw an 8×8″ canvas with a photo of an orange lying on top of it. Hmmm, I wonder. . .

So, I started a new painting of an orange.

Because I have painted more oranges than I can remember, I was able to veer away from the photo but keep it believable. Of course, I had my painting friend with me to point out any areas of weakness.

I bypassed a few steps here: no wire on the back, no layering, no drying, no scan, no varnishing. But it will dry, Cindy will deliver, and our customer from Spain will go home with 2 paintings in her luggage!