Found it! From the archives of...

Now that I have this great awesome new camera, I have been digging through my storage unit to be able to present to you all the archives; art that I made before I started this blog. And honestly I am reaallllly upset that I didn't have a better camera to be able to share in glorious technicolor the work I've done while I have had the blog.

From the archives... in no particular order:

Color study of 3 1/2 mangoes.

This is a watercolor that I did in a few hours. It was supposed to be a quick study that serves three purposes: a. practice what we just learned in Glee Fenby's class about light and dark and how shadows are even less solid than we think. b. to not spend so much time in the thinking about how to paint but in the actual painting. I'm type A so I forget that easily. c. to lose the fear of watercolor. I had a bad experience in Mrs. Kozlowski's class with watercolor which stemmed from a stilted & stingy application of the palette. This resulted in my setting aside hopes of watercolor for 15 years.

Having Michelle teach me how to clean an ink pad, marker tips and then applying that to the wells of color in a tin gave me the confidence to play. I learned that you can make as big a mess in the tin as you want because no one at Bienfang was going to roll in their grave if you got purple in your yellow. And then... the gloves were off. I just didn't really "get it" until I had some formal instruction.

Color studies have always been employed by the "really good quality" artists... da Vinci did somewhat, but he was kinda ADHD before ADHD was cool. The old masters did this as a preliminary step to applying the colors of oils to canvas. It really does help you make certain you have the right composition before committing precious supplies to something that won't work. And this worked.

It worked so well I decided to name it "Mango Sunrise" and sign it. Then I loved it so much I put it in a frame. And that was just a color study. The painting that followed is one that you've all seen before.

3 1/2 Mangoes

What I like about the watercolor is that the light is there. The mangoes rinds have a watery translucence that they don't really have in real life and there is an expansiveness in the composition. What doesn't work for me is that they seem to float. It was just a color study and I was not worried about how they were going to "sit" on the page. Just how I was going to get those bands of colors in the rind and make the pit stand out.

What I liked about the acrylic painting to the right is that there is a festive quality with the purple and turquoise. I was just dividing the negative space to give some sense of placement without really knowing how I was going to finish it. So the effect I got was like boards from a market stall. And I thought Mexican fiesta once I figured out where on the color wheel the background colors had to come from.

What did not work for me was that the lightness got lost. I could have brushed more white across the top of the far left mango but the paint was sliding and not really sticking to the layers that went down before. And while you can go light over dark to fix mistakes like the purple chunk taken out of the top right mango... in theory, the more I tried to work out where my brush slipped the worse I made it and those very cool hash marks that happened by accident were going to disappear. All in all the yellow hashing draws the eye away from the boo boo so I decided to stop and leave it be.

And the pit lost something in translation.

But I love this one. It is one of the things that I do not know I would ever sell because from start to finish, even considering the flaws, this was the most successful process I had within the scope of acrylic painting.

And it's just such a Damn Happy Painting.!

The beauty of living in the future, as Uncle Wil says, is that I can keep the original and with PoD I can make as many of these things as I want on just about anything. As soon as I have the right software I will open a shop at cafepress.com. In the meantime I think that moo.com will be printing some happy little greeting cards for me.

The Next Great Studio Purcahse

I do not know when this will happen. But it needs too. At only 92.00 I can't NOT get this one. It is the Leechwood Convertible Easel from Dick Blick. It looks like a great thing to have. Especially since I only have small spaces to work in.

If I ever get anywhere with a lot of space then I can have a couple going at once right?
Well... spent today sick as a dog after being sicker than a dog. All I managed was to unpack a few bags of supplies and set out to deal with the Poe challenge at Somerset Studio. Do not know that I will make the deadline. But will endeavor to do so.

I started out the same way that Mr. Trapp had us set out to study a poem. I made a thick margin down the right hand side of my page to make notes later. Then set out to copy "The Raven". I did not remember this poem being so long! Anyway. After the poem was copied I went back and wrote in the large margin the key things from each stanza that stuck out to me. And added any other pertinent notes from the treasure trove of information tucked into the nooks and crannies of my mind. Boy are there a lot of crannies!

Next I made the sketch.
What I want to do is going to require a great deal of math on my part. Harlequin windows for my interpretation on the latticed window through which the bird entered. YIKES! All kinds of math involved in this. I am not happy about it. But I can not think of any other way to get some kind of movement into the piece. And... it gives me lots of opportunity to bring rubberstamping into the project. The other thing that I am worried about is the process that I have decided on for setting the leading in the window.... could be problematic.

Anyway.... I'm off to ponder, weak and weary,
over many a quaint and curious episode of ghost hunting lore.....

Could this BE the new F r i e n d s ?

It would seem that almost everyone on my facebook friends list watches Castle. And I wonder, as my friend little sarah and I were texting back and forth even though we live in the same building... could this be the new friends?

When NBC ran Friends, those of us who were tight in our little group and enjoyed the show stopped the world for Friends. We got subs from TOGOs in the villiage or pasties from nextdoor and hunkered down for the night. And now, as the 4th season is set to open in less than 15 MINUTES! we are all a chatter with talk of getting all and sundry together for a viewing. It's kinda like Friends night but on a Monday at ABC and there is no clapping along with the theme song. Oh and its 10 pm instead of the earlier 8:30 ish.

Still.... how much fun would it be to have Castle nights? It would kinda be like David Hewlett's date night* but without the crying and the red wine.

Well gotta go. Soup's on. Literally. It's Bear Creek Cheddar potato with ham bits and extra cheese on top with a hearty dash of black pepper and garlic.

*David Hewlett is single-handedly responsible for at least three viewers. He tweeted about Castle and it being the date night goto plan. And I checked it out and was hooked. I brought at least 2 people aboard the Castle train. Way to go Hewlett. And Nate... if you see him at a Con  try to remember that he really isn't Rodney and thank him instead of punching him... even if that's what we want to do to Rodney. Thanx.

New Camera



watercolor of poppy seed pods

The camera is a GE X500 16.0 mega pixel with 15X wide angle optical zoom lens. It came with an 8gig memory card and I bought the case in addition to it. The whole kit and caboodle cost me less than 180.00.
This is a 3.5 by 7 inch watercolor. The shot is of just the top portion of the piece. And look how friggin cool this shot is. It shows all the variations: paper textures, the way the colors flowed across the paper for wet into wet blending AND clear pencil marks from the cross hatching I added when it was dry.

I am so excited. My next project from moo is going to be so much more cooler than the last with awesome clear shots like these. With the macro setting I was practically right on top of the paper and nothing is blurry. This will make all kinds of good things even better.

See... Michelle told me to be careful

So I went cruising through the Google images today. Nothing big. I just want a wall in my castle that is a tribute to my favorite German schlager artist... Matthias Reim (you know I know you guys know who it is. But the first time reader may not. So for them I spell it out). There is page after page of this guy. Sadly it's a lot of the same shots. Well long about page 58 I find a bright purple line drawing. What!?!?!

At first I was like "OMG! Someone might see that and tell him that there is fan art for him on the web!" And how cool would that be. And then my Capricorn, which has reared its ugly head lately, kicked in with a reality check... which feels more like a Reality Colonoscopy than a Reality Check, and said wait a dang minute. Okay that is not what the Capricorn said. But the Aquarius writing this doesn't know how to say it without resorting to cheap Klingon epithets. "Wait a dang minute! Who  said that Google could throw my shit into the mix for all and sundry to gander at.?!?!?!?!?!?!"

I set all of my blogs to privatize my pictures my not linking them into a picasa album. But apparently someone running information between microprocessors didn't get that 0101011110 piece of info. So now, buried on the last page of a google images albumn of matthias Reim is my line drawing. Michelle told me to imprint some identifying mark on my stuff before I put it out there. Lesson learned I guess.

I hope to God he (Matze not God) sees it and is amused, intrigued and thankful for something tasteful done in his honor. And I hope that who ever steals it and makes money on it chokes on an overpriced dinner if they don't give me credit or at least some shiny gold rocks in the form of the whatever they made with it.

also in the sketchbook...

Truly a sketchbook page: I don't know if I want to seperate this permanently. At first I just wanted to do the crow in a 4x4 and be done with it. But the more I looked at it the more I thought this would be a good compostition as a whole.

On the crow theme, there are notes on the left side of the page. This is either going to be the Crow for Sting or the pun.... or maybe it will be more. I found this crow shape in a photograph and, true to art you have to make it your own.... the birds beak and some of the wing feathers are nibs of a fountain pen. But what am I going to do with it now? I have had a few ideas but nothing really solid and concrete.

As a growth exercise, I learned a lot about patience when dealing with this medium. And a lot about how the brushes need to work to make textures. While everything was still wet the crow looked horrible. It worried me. Once it dried it looked great.

From the Sketchbook of...

Inspired by my own projects with www.moo.com I started working on some more watercolors. They turned out way better than previous experience told me they would. So I have been living with my sketchbook at my side 24/7.

I liked the way that the cacao pod photographed. And that is the color scheme I wanted to stick with. For the last year or so I've been thinking that I need to change up the motif. But really, to keep it fresh all I needed to do was change up the colors. I've been in the orange, red, yellow with a hint o green for years. So now I'm into the Summer colors with lots of blue and green balancing the reds.

The only thing with this sketch is the vase. The structure is totally off. Can you say "outta practice"? Boy I can. Still... I like how vibrant this is. And I am really happy with the technique. It is a lot less controlled than the way that I usually do watercolor. I think this means that I an loosening up.