Author: cabinart

Hidden Homes and Gardens

For several years, The Three Rivers Union School Foundation has organized a tour of gardens in our town to benefit the school.

The school always needs money. It is a one-school district, and the principal also teaches all day. These situations always cause me to wonder where the magical lottery money that was supposed to save our schools went, but no one brings that up or has answers. But, I digress.

On the first Hidden Gardens tour, I set up in the garden of my amazing friend Barbara. There were so many scenes to photograph and to paint! We collaborated on stepping stones a few years later. (lavender paintings on saltillo tiles)

This year, the Foundation has run out of celebrity gardens to bring in the visitors (William Shatner and Anjelica Huston both have places here in town). What to do?? Add homes!

I have the privilege of planting myself (ahem – pun intended) in a place up the South Fork with a beautiful view up the canyon, a fabulous new Craftsman style house, a classic barn, sheep, pigs, and plantings that were gorgeous in March. Not sure what I will find to paint in April, in spite of the cooler weather. March was hot and fried the hillsides to their more usual shade of brown.

The Tour is Saturday, April 18. A good article about it is here. Tickets may be found here. (will open in new windows)

What’s A Central California Artist to Do? part 2

beach birds

Beach Birds, pencil, size forgotten, sold

If you are a Central California artist, you may occasionally have times when: taking inventory is boring; ordering packaging supplies for notecards that aren’t moving very quickly feels like a waste of money, planning for paintings when one’s current body of work is collecting dust feels futile, writing blog posts is difficult when technology fails and photos won’t load; calling on stores and galleries feels futile when they don’t keep their posted hours or end up closing altogether.

So what?

One of my drawing students and friends often the line blurs) gave me a sign that hangs in the painting studio. It reads “Put on your big girl pants and get busy”.

Getting busy looks like this:

order envelopes and clear bags for notecards
order some of the card designs that have sold out
edit newer photos and order prints
call or email the names on the waiting list for drawing lessons (One lady said “I’m waiting for you to give a watercolor class”. She’ll be waiting a very long time, because I don’t know how to watercolor paint.)
blog ahead
update the inventory, where-to-buy and events pages on the website
put more sticker decals on the covers of The Cabins of Wilsonia
package notecards
take care of the hassles and realities of tax season

AHA! Tax season. Could that be the reason for the current state of mind? Thanks, IRS. Way to wreck the most beautiful time of year.

Guess I’ll just pretend as if someone has forbidden me to work on the business of art. That should light a fire under me!

How do you remain productive during your slow seasons?

What’s a Central California Artist to Do?

reading rabbit

Sometimes I feel like quitting.

Have you ever noticed that what one must do just holds no interest?

For example, if my job was yardwork, I’d be dying to paint. My job is painting, so I’m dying to do some yardening.

What causes this?? A lingering rebellion from adolescence? A streak of stubbornness? The thing called “resistance” by Steven Pressfield in The War of Art?

When sales are slow or studio tour visitation is low or attendance in drawing lessons declines, I wonder why I push onward. The work has no sense of importance and certainly no urgency. I don’t feel the press of any deadlines, so I dink around home, avoiding the studio.

It takes discipline, thought about what is ahead, planning, optimism, leaning into past experience and sheer determination to use my “down” time wisely.

What’s a Central California artist to do??

Come back tomorrow. Maybe I’ll have an answer or two.

What do you do when you feel unmotivated?

Mineral King Mural Finished

Doesn’t “Mineral King Mural Finished” sound like a newspaper headline? My “client” (what a stuffy word) Mrs. Cowboy called a reporter friend from her local newspaper to ask her if she’d like to write up our project, but the reporter was covering a mule packing class that day.

Because of the heat and time constraints, I went out to paint early in the morning. It is easy to do this when you are staying in the building where the mural is. This location is 2 hours from Three Rivers, so I had to make the most of the time available, which was 2 days.

This is how it looked at 7 a.m. on Day Two after 7 hours of painting on Day One.

I detailed things for an hour, then stopped, knowing I’d get back to it around noon. I was hungry and don’t believe in the myth of the “starving artist”. Mrs. Cowboy has New Hampshire Red chickens and guinea fowl, so there were fresh eggs for breakfast.

Oh my, that tarp was so very necessary.

I coated everything a second time and tried to detail as I went. But, just as a writer cannot proofread his own work, an artist can’t “proofread” her own painting.

Trail Guy and Mrs. Cowboy were on hand to discuss various details of the mural and help me get it to the best it could be. We added textures, messed with shapes, fiddled a bit with colors.

And just for fun, notice how the shadow cast by the tarp has moved throughout the day.

I purposely made the colors brighter than real life. This is because the mural faces East and will fade in the strong morning sun. Morning sun isn’t as damaging as afternoon sun or even as bad as all day winter sun, but it does suck out all the yellows first. This means the greens will turn bluish, and the grays will go to lavender.

After 13-1/2 hours over two days, this was our Mineral King mural. No longer was a fast horse necessary for optimal viewing, although a neighbor did ride up partway through the process.

Wow. Looks like someone successfully photoshopped a Mineral King photograph onto a door.

Nope. I painted that in 13-1/2 hours! (Imagine the sound of an arm breaking from patting oneself on the back. . .)

Why estimate hours when it is thank you gift? Because all murals are practice for me, and if I am getting paid, I need to be able to successfully estimate the time it will take. I’d say that was a mighty fine guess! (an “educated guess”, based on experience)

It needs 3 more things: a title, a hidden item, and a bear. Later. Now I have to go earn some money!

The Cabins of Wilsonia Book Signing, Saturday, April 4, 3-7 p.m., Three Rivers Historical Museum

The First Coat on the Mineral King Mural

This mural is about 6-1/2 feet high and 5-1/2 feet wide. It is a joy to paint a mural that requires no scaffolding or ladders. It speeds things up a bit to be able to simply step back and see how things look.

Please appreciate the shade, supplied by the handy and innovative Trail Guy. I certainly did!

You can see things look a little rough and short on detail. Gotta start somewhere! (In drawing, I call this “drawing the dog before the fleas”.)

I brought along a jar of a teal color, simply because it happens to be the favorite color of both Mrs. Cowboy and me. We were both just thrilled to see it would be very helpful to do the water!

After getting the entire surface covered, I returned to the sky for the second coat. With the heat, it was dry and ready to repaint. Since I had only 2 days to do this mural from start to finish and had estimated 14 hours, there was no knocking off for the day when I simply felt like quitting.

Mrs. Cowboy requested some clouds, so I pulled some out of my memory as I was recoating the sky. I figured we could either refine them together or I could just paint them out entirely.

And thus we conclude the retelling of Day One of painting of a Mineral King mural in 2 days. It’s looking pretty good, especially if you are on the back of a fast horse.

After the Conversations, the Mural Begins

A year passed since Mrs. Cowboy Bert and I decided what to paint on the side of her house. Life (and sad to report, also death) happened, so I just waited until she was ready to proceed. I wasn’t bored, but thanks for your concern.

I showed up around 11 a.m. on a Thursday and was in my terrible painting clothes ready to hit the wall by noon. Trouble is, it was really really bright and sunny, a difficult situation for painting.

This was not a problem, because Trail Guy was with me and all prepared to Okie-rig up some shade. (Apologies to my friends from Oklahoma. . . is there a better expression to describe this?)

I drew it on the canvas (a roll-up door so a forklift can off-load bags of pellets for the stove) as close to the sketch as possible. Before I began painting, I masked the edges, which are some sort of a rubber gasket around the door.

Next, I painted in the sky using a color that I had already mixed for skies.

Does this look like Mineral King and Farewell Gap to you?

I cleaned my brush off on the stream area, because I could tell that it would take 2 coats of paint to cover this door material. It was some sort of baked-on white paint atop metal. Might as well use the color on the brush to begin covering the surface as well as getting as much out of the bristles and ferrule as possible (that is the metal section on a brush that holds the bristles to the handle.)

Maybe this 2 day painting project can be stretched out into a week of blog posts!

Will that make you excited for tomorrow?

Murals Begin With Conversations

This mural was painted as a thank you for my friend Cowboy Bert, who built a handrail for the steps up to my studio.

Last year we began discussing it, and I posted it on the blog in March. However, when my website broke, lots of photos disappeared, so you don’t get a link here to go back and see.

I first looked through Mrs. Cowboy Bert’s photos. We talked a lot. That’s what we do. This time it was about ideas.

Then I did a bit of photoshopping to get the idea ball rolling. Here are a couple of the things we tried:

Screen shot 2015-03-28 at 4.46.27 PM

(I’m not that good at Photoshop. Just be polite, okay?)

Then, we conversed some more. Mrs. Cowboy told me more about her vision, which developed with time and talk. It resulted in this sketch, which she whole-heartedly approved.

mural sketch

Good thing she knows that I can draw and paint, because otherwise, this might have been a bit too sketchy for her. (Ever wonder where the word “sketchy” came from? Now you know!)

That is Farewell Gap which is in Mineral King. Are you surprised??

Wilsonia Book Signing Saturday!

Do you remember that I made a book on the cabins of Wilsonia? It is called The Cabins of Wilsonia, because I am Mrs. Captain Obvious.

Cabin Fireplace

Cabin Fireplace, pencil on paper, matted and framed to 11×14″, $200

Available here (will open in new window)

Notice the expression “made” a book . It is a picture book, with 272 (give or take a few) pencil drawings of, yep, you guessed it, the cabins of Wilsonia. There is writing, but it is minimal. It sounds funny to say I drew a book. Sounds too much like drawing the short straw. . .

On Saturday, April 4, from 3 – 6 p.m. I will be at the Three Rivers Historical Museum with my dear friend Louise Jackson, who has written many books. We will have our books with us, along with our pens for signing. I will also bring the original drawings from the book, some framed, some not.

Any questions?

You can read about the making of this book on my other site The Cabins of Wilsonia.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Captain Obvious

Monarch Trail Revisited

There is a section of the Mineral King trail returning from Monarch Lakes that always catches my eye. It has some gnarly looking junipers, and I photograph it over and over.

I painted it once. Turned out pretty well, sold quickly.

Monarch Trail

Monarch Trail, oil on wrapped canvas, size forgotten, painted in 2008

Because I like the redo on the Oak Grove Bridge and am currently enjoying painting in a square ~~format~~ (“format”?? When did I stop saying “shape”??) shape, and because I think my painting has improved (one would hope so within a 7 year period), I decided to try it again.

Monarch Trail

Monarch Trail, oil on wrapped canvas, 10×10″, $150

New and improved? Or just more detailed? Taste is an individual matter, and currently I am drawn to brighter colors rather than trying to match reality like a Xerox painter. I’m also not trying as hard to copy things perfectly. Life is short – mix brighter colors, and don’t try so hard. Or try harder on the things that matter. But how do you know which ones matter?

Never mind. Enjoy the new square painting of the Monarch Trail.

Same County, Different Bridge

In February, I told you of my drawing of the Clover Creek Bridge up in Sequoia National Park and a man who saw it and contacted me. (That post will open in another window if you click here.)

The man, named Todd, had googled “pencil drawing of a cabin” and found my site. On my site (the old one) was a drawing of the Clover Creek Bridge.

clovercreek_bridge_1

Todd practiced drawing by copying my picture. It is the easiest way to learn how to draw and is what my 6th grade teacher had us do. (I credit him with teaching me how to draw.)

I thought he was doing a fine job because his proportions were correct. That is the most important thing when beginning a drawing. It is comparable to having your foundation level and your posts vertical if you are framing a building.

I also gave him a couple of tips about hard edges and soft edges. Real life doesn’t have black outlines separating things; it has edges. Hard edges are clean exact edges, where one item ends precisely and another begins. They draw the viewers eye and are very noticeable. Soft edges are slightly fuzzy transitions from one to another part of the same thing. They make things not stand out.

(I don’t see any black outlines – I just wanted to give him some tips because he was thoughtful enough to contact me.)

Todd gave me permission to post his work here:

todd's clvr crk

I hope he finishes the drawing and continues to draw.