The distant groves and fields are probably finished.
Time to begin the embellishments. I found blueberry photos on the interwebs, AND I have my own from excursions in Oregon.
In my extensive collection of photos, I found one of avocado leaves, pre-digital. I used my inferior phone camera to take a picture so I could flip it on my laptop.
Not really adequate. . . I know where there is an enormous avocado tree, so I’ll go get some better photos to finish the leaves.
Then I’ll retouch some of the other details, paint the edges, sign it, wait for it to dry again, varnish it, and then package it up to ship to the realtor customers.
Reminder
I help people write books and get them printed. The books that I have shepherded from idea to publication but that I don’t sell can be found on this new page: OTHER PEOPLE’S BOOKS. This includes Tales of TB, Springville’s Hospital, The Crooked Cross of Diamond Lake, Only the Living, and Adventures in Boy Scouting.
Five step-by-step photos today, mostly painting left to right.
So many parts in the photo were ambiguous and repetitive that I often lost my place. A way to combat this lostness is to first paint the things that are definite, then make up the stuff around them. Some of my sizes are probably definitely wrong, and some of the fields are missing. The customer said accuracy isn’t important—she is looking for conceptual interpretation of the subject. I don’t think there are any Geography Police gunning for me.
Lower left will be blueberries; upper right will be avocado leaves.
I am liking the painting, which is always a relief, especially when it starts out so loose and rough and confusing.
Things got confusing, so I flipped it all upside down to see if I could focus better on the shapes.
Moving forward
Hi Jackson. Please do not bite me while I am painting. It would also be appreciated if you didn’t lean on the back of my legs.
Can I get all the different groves, fields, and patches in? How important is it to get each one perfect? The customers said it isn’t, but accuracy is a driving force as I paint.
The roof of the house is now in the lower left. There will be blueberries covering most of the house, a decorative addition. They will be balanced by avocado leaves in the upper right corner.
Now it can dry a bit before I continue adding and tightening the detail.
REMINDER
I can help people write books and get them printed. The books that I have shepherded from idea to publication but that I don’t sell can be found on this new page: OTHER PEOPLE’S BOOKS. This includes Tales of TB, Springville’s Hospital, The Crooked Cross of Diamond Lake, Only the Living, and Adventures in Boy Scouting.
1.Actually, I learned this on March 31, thanks to Reader Marjie: those tiny tangerines are called “Pixie Tangerines”, and many (all? prolly not) grow in Ojai.
2. DO NOT BUY THINGS ON THE INTERNET IN A HURRY! I got swept away by a good offer from Photo Affections that was about to expire, and I was so enamored with my iris that I ordered something that is just a waste of money—flat cards with no room to write instead of foldover cards. I thought I’d learned this lesson earlier, but nope, here I am again. Hmmm, I wonder if these fall into the category of Cruft. (See #4 on March Learned List.)
3. Have you ever programmed a complicated timer for a complicated irrigation system? It’s complicated. The fact that the directions use different words than the actual box (i.e. valve=station) further complicates a complicated situation. To add to the complications, many of the items in the box are not labeled so I keep forgetting which word applies to which knob/button/dial. But I think I have it figured out. Complicated, for sure. (Have I ruined the word “complicated” for you yet?)
4. There are friends in life who influence us deeply. Some friends are there for just a season or for a particular reason, but that doesn’t negate the marks they leave on our hearts, memories, and even habits. I have one such friend, a roommate for 2-3 years many decades ago, whose influence keeps appearing in multiple places in my life, in spite of only exchanging birthday cards (Can’t forget that because we share the same birthday). Recently we began a little bit of texting, and it is such a miraculous thing to be in instant touch, so special.
5. lagniappelan-yap noun: a small gift given with a purchase to a customer. I’ve done this but didn’t know it had an actual word. I wonder how a customer would respond if I handed him a painting and said, “I’ve thrown in a little lagniappe for you.” The customer would probably say, “A what? Looks like a package of cards to me!”
6. When formatting and designing a book, it is prudent to order a single copy for physical hands-on proofing and viewing. Recently I could not make a purchased InDesign book design template work and in frustration, I downloaded a free template from the printing/publishing company. Author Louise Jackson and I were thrilled with the cover, but the interior of the actual book was just unattractive. So, I persevered on the temperamental template until I figured out how to bypass its idiosyncracies (well, whaddaya expect when it is from 2015 and so is my laptop, which can no longer be updated, because Planned Obsolescence is trying to bankrupt us all), and REDID THE ENTIRE BOOK DESIGN. It was worth the effort.
Happy with the outer appearance (and dressed to match, of course).
6. I read something in a fluffy novel that really resonated deeply with me, and I will plagiarize it here, making it personal: When I walk past Fernando, I “feel a strange longing that can only be described as a deep psychological problem; I seem to be locked in a prison of my own nostalgia.” Clearly I am a disturbed individual rather than a rational, wise, and mature 66-year-old. Sigh. Please be gentle with me. (Now I forget which book I got this from.)
Yeppers, added the canoe to the sale of the car because I no longer have a way to transport it and my wrist hurts too much. Hmm, a lagniappe!Hi Buddy! Do you miss me? I miss you!
7. You can make brownies without flour using black beans. WHAT? This is so weird that I had to try it. Here is the link to the recipe I used, chosen because it had the least sugar and the most cocoa powder: Black Bean Brownies. Decent, but of course boxed brownie mix with a handful of chocolate chips added to the batter are better. If you are curious, out of flour, can’t eat wheat, have black beans you don’t need, whatever. . . try it.
8. Life is complicated and if when something breaks, we have 2 choices: figure it out or replace/toss it. “Figure it out” = “just Google it”. But how? Type in the appliance number and see what appears. Try to figure out what part is needed, have a “chat” with “someone” for help, get the name of the broken part, try to match it to the list of parts, oops the part name is different from what the Chat Someone called it, get back in line to clarify the part name, order the part (if it is available), and then try to find someone who will call you back and then actually show up to install it. Who is designing all this? Young “hipsters” who are supposedly concerned about the planet/climate change/putting junk in the landfills? Life is complicated AND exhausting, because I am supposed to be painting, not waiting for my turn in a “Chat Request” line. (THE PART WAS $104 FROM GE AND $28 FROM AMAZON, in case you were wondering, and a friend/repairman replaced it for $100.)
9. I sent some watches to The Veterans Watchmaker Initiative, Inc. (P.O. Box 329, Little Creek, DE 19961) and SOMEONE WROTE ME A THANK YOU NOTE!! (I sent 5 watches, but the thank you said 4; I’ll let it pass.) Their website ticks like a clock—let not your hearts be troubled—At first I thought my laptop was about to explode.
10. Have you ever heard of a city named “Brno” or the country of Czechia? It was new to me, via my friend Elisabeth’s blog. She’s and her family are spending 3 months living and traveling in Europe, and her photos and information is terrific. The Czech Republic is now called “Czechia” and Brno is the 2nd largest city after Prague. The cities throughout her extended travels so far all kind of look alike to me; if I was doing such a trip, I’d be visiting the countryside and little villages, taking photos of barns, cottages, gates, fences, trails, roads, fields and streams. But I do love seeing the fancy architecture.
11. Sometimes it really helps to call for assistance. My MacBook Pro kept saying I was out of room, and Apple kept trying to sell me a larger “cloud” plan. (BUG OFF, I have an external hard drive and don’t need The Cloud, so there.) I called Apple for help, and after a few attempts, a supervisor did a screenshare with my laptop and discovered a bunch of useless and mysterious stuff slowing things down. It was thrilling to have it deleted, to see all the available space, and to have things working well again.
A different sort of apple; this is an exercise I devised to use teaching peope how to draw.
12. Egg doesn’t wash off once it dries on a wall. It also takes a few coast of paint to hide the shine left from the egg. I’ve heard it destroys the paint job on a car too. If eggs were still running around $7/dozen, maybe someone wouldn’t have wasted one on the Ivanhoe library mural.
13. I learned to use my Brother printer to scan pencil drawings. It isn’t big enough for most of my work, but it will help until I figure out another plan. Look at the difference in 2 scans of my drawing student’s artichoke picture; on the left is the Brother scan without any Photoshop touch-up and the Mustek scan is on the right (also no touch-up, duh).
14. I figured out how to add a page to the Store on my website. It’s called OTHER PEOPLE’S BOOKS, and it is where you can order any of the books I helped get printed, most of which are NOT on Amazon. My authors (and all authors unless you are like John Grisham or Danielle Steel) need help to sell their books. This is the only way I know to help them.
Pencil drawing of Kaweah Lake, 11×14”, $375, unframed. (This is the May picture in my 2026 calendar.)
Reminder
I can help people write books and get them printed. The books that I have shepherded from idea to publication but that I don’t sell can be found on this new page: OTHER PEOPLE’S BOOKS. This includes Tales of TB, Springville’s Hospital, The Crooked Cross of Diamond Lake, Only the Living, and Adventures in Boy Scouting.
The real estate customers chose the panoramic shape.
Good thing they know I can paint. (Well, duh, that’s why they commissioned me.)
This is similar to my current favorite subject to draw and paint, but there are blueberries and avocados rather than orange trees. There is also a distinct lack of snow-covered mountains and no poppies on the distant hills, but still, it is similar.
View from Wutchumna, 12×24”, private collection
Wait, “current” favorite subject? The painting above was completed in 2022. Here’s the first one I did in 2008.
Family Farm, size forgotten, private collection
Before oil painting, I drew similar scenes in colored pencil in a year I did not record, before I had a scanner, and when I had a web designer who added watermarks.
And before that, I drew similar scenes in pencil.
Spring Citrus, pencil, sold long ago
Enough remembering and bloviating. Get back to work, Central California Artist!
Reminder
I help people write books and get them printed. The books that I have shepherded from idea to publication but that I don’t sell can be found on this new page: OTHER PEOPLE’S BOOKS. This includes Tales of TB, Springville’s Hospital, The Crooked Cross of Diamond Lake, Only the Living, and Adventures in Boy Scouting.
This 1st grade dork had no idea of the pitfalls and roadblocks ahead in life.
A pie.
About 40 years ago, I had a summer job as a baker, and the place was known for pies. A guy from church told me about a pie his mom used to make for him and asked if I would make it for him. I was willing to try, so he brought me the recipe. He called it “chocolate meringue” and the recipe called it “chocolate chiffon” —I call it “chocolate pie failure”.
I wrote this to a friend who inherited the baking job:
Everything was wrong: my Crisco had been in the fridge for probably 10 years and for some reason had oil all over the outside top of the lid. What?? And the stuff in the can looked dried out, so I put it in the trash and found a recipe for a pie crust with butter.
Why does EVERY pie dough recipe NEVER have enough water? “Add 1 T at a time, up to 1/4 cup” —useless, with tons of dry flour leftover in the bowl. But I persisted, and eventually was able to roll it out, using a spray bottle of water to get the cracks to glue together.
“Blind baking” is unfamiliar to me, but I lined the pan with foil on top of the dough and filled it with uncooked navy beans to hold it down. It worked well enough, but the butter melted and coated the crust with oil. Is this normal?
The pie filling used gelatin, and the envelopes I had were probably 2 or 3 decades old. So what? It’s gelatin, so I used it anyway.
It called for egg whites, beaten stiff. Kind of hard without an electric mixer or even a hand-crank egg beater, so I pulled out my immersion blender. Useless. Would NOT beat the egg whites stiff. Oh well, I added the called-for sugar despite the textural wrongness.
Then I thought that maybe I should give the egg whites another chance, so I started over with 3 more eggs. Nada. Zip. Zilch. No stiffness.
So I just mixed everything together and poured it into the pie crust, and then was horrified to see that the filling, which contains 3 eggs, DOES NOT GET COOKED.
It sat in the fridge overnight, in the hopes it would solidify. Alas, it did not, and when I dipped a spoon into the extra filling to test it, it was very grainy because apparently the gelatin did NOT jell, in spite of following the directions.
In reading an updated version of the recipe (from a more current Better Homes & Gardens red and white checked cookbook), I learned that there are many important steps that my old recipe did not happen to mention. In theory, it could turn out in a second attempt with all the nuances and proper tools, but in reality, I’m done. Because of the raw eggs, all the time wasted spent, and the fact that it was chocolate, I baked it (raw eggs—no thanks). It is weird but edible (CHOCOLATE!).
A Shawl
I found some almost thread-weight cotton yarn at a yard sale many years ago and this winter, in an attempt to work through my yarn stash (still extensive in spite of my severe yarn diet of the past 3-4 years), decided to turn it into a shawl. This is the kind of pattern that starts with about 3 stitches, and every other row you add another 4 stitches to grow it into a triangle shape. The rows get longer and longer, ending with 366 stitches, and the lace pattern chart gets harder and harder to follow as the piece grows. My shawl looks as if there is no lace pattern, just a random mess of disorganized lace. I knew I was off many times, and decided that it didn’t matter. If a person is wearing a shawl, the pattern isn’t usually visible. I just kept plowing ahead, and the results are a dog’s breakfast. A lacy pink dog’s breakfast.
The angle of my inferior phone camera doesn’t show the triangular shape.
A Phone
An elderly friend bought a cordless phone and couldn’t make it work. I went to her house and did some troubleshooting, concluding that the phone was defective. I ordered another, and she meticulously followed each step to set it up. Zip, zero, zilch, nada. All I can figure out is that her “old” landline is not up to the current technological requirements of telephone behaviors. This is someone who has no internet or cell phone, and she is very determined to keep her life simple. Together we decided that this is just a time waster, so we’ll return both phones.
We both think that mail is a fine and reliable way to communicate.
Not a failure
I can draw.
I can help people write books and get them printed. The books that I have shepherded from idea to publication but that I don’t sell can be found on this new page: OTHER PEOPLE’S BOOKS. This includes Tales of TB, Springville’s Hospital, The Crooked Cross of Diamond Lake, Only the Living, and Adventures in Boy Scouting.
Some friends in real estate in a distant place have occasionally asked me to paint something for a customer after a large sale is made. Client. I think “client” is probably more correct here.
Remember these?
Hmmm, was my scanner going south back then too? This is darker than the painting.
I wonder if the clients appreciated the paintings. No one has gotten in touch to thank me or ask for more.
Doesn’t matter. My customers are happy enough to come back to me. (Yes, my people are customers, rather than clients, and no, I don’t actually know the difference except that one sounds more expensive.)
My customers sent me the listing with gorgeously staged photos of the house and some drone shots (also gorgeous) of the giant property.
From these, with a little bit of guidance after I asked all the questions I could think of, I did two quickity sketches. The customers chose two possible sizes, probably based on their budget, and the sketches are proportional to each of the two sizes.
The property is a blueberry farm along with avocado groves. The house, although fabulously fabulous beyond all fabulosity, isn’t that important here.
Good thing they know that I can paint and draw.
To be continued. . .
BONUS: I read this from James Clear’s newsletter: “The problem with keeping your options open is that every option requires energy to hold. And a shelf full of maybes is often heavier than a hand holding one yes. Put something down.”
Maybe you are thinking that it is difficult to paint according to people’s instructions (called “commissions” or “commissioned art”). That might be true for some artists, but I am not one of them. I’ve said for decades that I’d rather draw an ugly house than be a waitress.
Maybe you are thinking that it is the lack of a steady paycheck. That is probably true for artists without supportive spouses with a steady income and insurance, but that is not me.
Maybe you are thinking that it is having to approach galleries. There aren’t any for-profit galleries in Tulare County, and since Tulare County is my focus, I don’t have to approach galleries. A benefit of having stayed here my entire career, both in subject matter and in the flesh, is that galleries (all non-profit) approach me. Not boasting, just stating the facts. There is much to be said for continuity and presence and reliability and community.
What about selling? Not a problem for me, because I don’t try to “sell” to people. I help people who want my art figure out which piece or pieces will please them most. No tricky words, no persuasive speech, just helping people.
None of those things are anyone’s favorite part about being an artist. So what is the hardest part?
The answer
Pricing. All artists HATE to set prices.
Other artists tell me my prices are way too low. However, my customers gasp and have to think about whether or not to spend money on my art. (That deflates any tendencies of getting fat-headed about being known in my area.)
There is a push-and-pull between keeping prices affordable while allowing those who do the expensive and boring work of maintaining a gallery or gift shop to have a fair cut of the profits. And keeping prices affordable is a bit of smoke-and-mirrors, the old 99 or 95 trick. If keeping prices consistent, and a size comes out to the price of $225, the tendency is to call it $199 or $195. If I do that, I’ve chopped $25 off my profit, and also chopped the seller’s cut.
What if I just painted small so all the prices are under $200 in order to keep the visitors and gift shops flowing along? This is often what I do.
But if I only paint small, then my inventory will not be ready for someone who asks for a larger piece, or when a gallery approaches for a show.
Ethics
On top of all that indecisiveness, there is an important piece to pricing: no matter where someone finds my work, it must be priced the same. Website, shows, galleries, my studio, stores—no “it’s cheaper at. . .” or “I know the artist and can get her to cut me a deal.” Nope. We* keep it consistent** and ethical, and if you see my piece at a show and then think that after the show you can get it cheaper from me, go have yourself another think. Likewise, if you see a piece at a show and wait to buy it directly from me, I will write the gallery a check for their cut anyway.
Conclusion
Push-me-pull-you, that llama from Dr. Doolittle with two heads, each one pointing a different direction—that’s a good symbol of the mess in my head when setting prices.
I need some chocolate.
I painted this 5×7” oil in 2006, not too long after beginning to work in oil.
*The royal we, since it is just big Queen Me-Me around here in this little business.
**Except sometimes I mess up, especially when doing stressful pricing math.
Because I have been helping people get their books printed but am not selling them myself, it is good to show people where to buy these books.
Therefore, I have a new page on my website listing the books and the links where they are for sale. This is a screenshot of my homepage and the menu.
If you click on the words OTHER PEOPLE’S BOOKS (not on the above screenshot—that won’t work), you will land on a page with the book covers, descriptions, and links to the places where they are for sale.
Only two books are available on Amazon; all are available either through Lulu.com or BookBaby.com. These places provide more income for the authors (and less hassle for their book shepherd, me).
