A Rep You Must Have

After talking with a few friends it has been decided that I need to start looking for an agent/representative to start selling my art for real. Hmmmm...... are there even any art reps in my little town?

Big Projects Lower Productivity

This Pecock Poppy Pomegranate thing is killing me. It's large format is proving to be quite daunting and time consuming. So far we are looking at about 14 hours over the course of 6 weeks, you know, work and chores getting in the way. But if I am going to be terribly productive I'm going to need some smaller projects to work on during the down time.

Themes I've been contemplating: cacao pods, coffee, other fruits besides pomegranates. Or learning to paint glass.

Better Art Through Chemistry

 I found this blue while cruising through the Blick catalog. It is a fairly close match to Indanthrene blue which I like for getting deep rich colors. I need a really full ranged blue for mixing colors. And I think that this will be it.

Doing a little research to see if my assumption that it is related to the quinacridones that I love, I found some interesting facts about this quirky little blue.

For one thing, the science behind all the chemistry that makes these colors is complicated! And a bit frustrating. There is a lot of information to wade through that is so far over my head that now I have a head ache. But the trivial stuff is kinda interesting

• this pigment is oxidized anthracene
• it is a building block of Alizarin Crimson
• this blue chemical is the agent used to BLEACH paper
• naturally occurring in aloe and rhubarb, some fungi and lichens as well as some insects
• used to make hydrogen peroxide

Who knew!

 

 

As with all new pigments added to your personal palette, it's always best to make swatch pages so that you can see how your new color reacts with the colors that you are already familiar with. You will quickly discover which combinations make mud and which ones make a vibrant new shade. With your own custom color swatch book you have a true to you resource. Your own light, your own hand gives you a much truer idea of how your project will come out than relying in an online resource which is subject to the quirks of the computer screen of the originating computer and yours own screen.

 

This is a sample of Anthraquinone Blue mixed with the first of many new colors for me

 



Progress

And another couple of layers go down. With the new additions to my stash of tubes, I added some Opera to the poppies near the top. Some of my poppies were a pale pink but not very vibrant. So when the Opera came... woo hoo!

And with a little Perylene Maroon, which is my goto for a deep red, the pomegranates really start to pop. I am especially pleased with the pome crown in the back. It actually looks like a real pomegranate and it feels to me like I've done something that the Masters would encourage.

One day I will do a tutorial on the texture I used. I used to do a pointalist approach but that is so tedious. This technique is much easier. But you have to have patience with yourself and let the layers dry well in between applications.

I haven't done anything with the poppy in the foreground yet. I really like the subtleties there and don't want to overwork it. But it does need to come out a little bit more.

Resistance is Futile

With a title like that you would expect this to be a post for Geekdom. But no... you are in the right place. The last few years without a brick and mortar art supply store in town has hurt. It hurts the community. And it hurts artists. We are stuck with the box stores that don't have the most highly informed staff. And without a car for a year getting a box store to be disappointed has been an issue. So I finally broke down and started surfing the Dick Blick website.

Dick Blick has been in business for as long as I've been a live, at least. And it is a trusted company. I just prefer to have a hands on experience rather than trust that a catalog's print shop has faithfully rendered the colors. I like to touch the thing that I am buying. I like to eyeball it so that I can tell if it is going to work in my space. But these days that is just not happening. When I needed the easel I just had to throw in the towel and swallow all of my assertions that holding out would bring a brick and mortar store back to town. And I was happy with the easel.... it is a great place to work.

Until that moment when you chose your favorite old yellow and can't open it. Not without breaking your teeth while the stuck cap is in the vice grip of your teeth. And when the vice grips fail to remove the lid without tearing the body of the tube apart you know that you have to break down and replace your favorite old yellow with a fresh tube. But the box sores don't carry it. Aureolin apparently is not a hot seller. And they apparently can not stock an adequate yellow hue of a different name for any length of time. I waited six weeks for one store to get a tube of gamboge back only to be told that the company discontinued it. Do you know how long it took me to get colors from Blick? Three days.... but I am getting ahead of myself.

The easel was great. The transfer paper that I ordered was great. And thus the slope gets slippery. One of the best things about the brick and mortar store is that when you are an artist pregnant with ideas and cravings set in at 3 a.m. no one is open. So you get to be a bit smarter about your impulse purchases and learn to make do in an art emergency. The worst part of a brick and mortar store when you are an artist pregnant with ideas and cravings set in at 3 a.m. is that no one is open. So your creativity has to wait for morning and your need to shop is tempered. Enter the internet age and the store is never closed.

And it is almost never out of stock. If it is out of stock you find out before you ever click on something. My resistance crumbled like a dry shortbread cookie.

So yesterday I picked up my order from the post box. 6 brand new tubes of color.... one that I had never heard of and one that I had been drooling over for about a decade now spilled out into my hand. With them a color that sounded intriguing as the cliffs of Dover but disappointed in reality. Another tube bearing the name of a pigment I love in maroon and stare moon-eyed at in violet. A completely utilitarian green gold that excites only when paired and a replacement for a color that I use quite a lot. Yes... color has broken down the last of my defenses against on-line shopping.  And strangely it was not the color that I had been drooling over.

It was the new blue. A blue so deep and rich that you have to see it to believe it. And the first thing that I have to do with all of these colors is make a worksheet that shows me how they all blend together. Thank you college instructor for teaching me how to do this for myself. It was one of those things that I think would have made watercolor lessons in high school less stressing.

What is this new blue?
I will tell you next time.....

Quick Sketch:Typography

watercolor on Strathmore paper
 

I've always been fascinated by letterforms and with my recent delve back into German language it seemed appropriate to look at these, the ess-set and umlauts.

Umlauts are those two little dots that appear over vowels to change their pronunciation, and only a, o, and u. The ess-set is a little tricky.

It is used in words spelled with a double S like Gross (large) which then would traditionally be spelled Große. It isn't always used in handwriting and is some times used in print for the two S spelling in modern German. Old High German is different. The ess-set was always used. And when the ess-set got into English via monarchial alliances via marriage it was simplified into a shape best described as an elongated f. And that complicates English for a modern reader who reads print from as recent as the 1700s because we see Wafhington instead of Washington... I don't know who decided to use the adapted ess-set for a single S spelling... but yikes! What a typographical nightmare.

And in German the nightmare just begins! Some German words can have more than two of a letter together. German doesn't contract either words to make a compound. It all gets crammed together. So if you were to take Gross+Stadt to mean "Big City" (because in German it would be a single word rather than two as in English) then it would be spelled "Großstadt".

Can you have four S spellings? I don't know. But I wouldn't want to try to pronounce it!

I love the shape of the ess-set. So I will probably play with it some more. No. I will play with it more. And now I kinda want to find a German scrapbooking supply company that would have a die cut for that.

hmmm.....


edited: later that evening in a studio somewhere in Northern Michigan

 *** Checking with Wikipedia BEFORE writing might be helpful.
Turns out the ß is actually the ligature of a long S (the thing that looks like an f) and a single s or z. So apparently the long f-looking s is a special brand of stupidity common throughout Europe that came here and got wiped out with better typography. Thank God.... it is hard enough to read fraktur or black letter fonts on a good day. If we still had to deal with this thing on a regular basis I think I would pull out all my hair. It is beautiful. I love ligatures and dipthongs. But that long S can not hang out in English these days with the volume of text read on a daily basis.

Poached

Painting is a slow going process. We have had such dark days lately that I just can't manage to get more than a few minutes at the easel. The sun has been a rather dodgy character lately. It's kind of frustrating. But in the mean time I am absorbing some new music with wonderful imagery that should yield some great results.

In the meantime I do have an artistic conundrum of my own to handle. I believe a website is selling my Italian vase on Blue without my compensation or credit. if you see this around the internet... it is mine and I'd like to know.

This was one of my Gramma's things. It sat on a shelf in the dining room with some object d' arte that were prettier. I kinda hated it when I was a kid. Maybe I mentioned this before. Anyway... after the grandparents were gone it sat on mom's shelves unused, covered in dust and rather loathed. But she would not get rid of it because of her insane belief that everything old is worth money. And I hated it more as a teenager.
But when I got to college and started looking at art processes more closely, having tried a few different kinds of things, then my ideas about it changed. The technical difficulty of getting two items essentially made of mud to stick together is well... let's just say if it doesn't involve a plasma coil and multi phasic transducers Mr. Scott couldn't make it happen. Pottery is a pain in the ass.

And as for watercolor. It was the only thing that I could find in the house with enough character to make learning how to paint fun. Challenging. But fun. So when the last of the parents were gone it was mine. And it is one of the few things left that I would not be willing to get rid of ever. Partly because of Gramma. And almost entirely because this is a damn good painting for a beginner. 2003 or 2004 I want to say. When I dig it out of storage I will let you know.

On a lark I though that I would have it printed for 40.00 only to find out that the coupon was no longer valid. And not only that it was automatically generated in an add. And the add will take you to the site to by this. It doesn't credit me. But you can buy it. Talk about angry.

I've written 3 scathing letters. Apparently I haven't been a big enough bitch.

That will change.