Oh, Those Red Carnations

The carnations were last seen at this stage. The coaster, vase with stems, bows, vase-base, roses, and even the curly willow weren’t up to the level that Mr. and Mrs. Fifty Years deserve.

What’s a Central California artist to do?

Well, just keep licking the canvas, of course. (Don’t get your knickers in a twist–it is only a figure of speech.)

When an item is complicated with subtle angles that matter, I turn it upside down and copy exactly what I see. Okay, not EXACTLY, but as close as I am able on the angles and proportions that matter. The coaster beneath the vase is a real bugger-bear, to quote my friend Ft. Worth Jim. (who pronounces his name “Jee-im” as if it has 2 syllables). 

(Hi Gnat!)

Where was I?

The upside down coaster, while looking at the upside down photo on the laptop screen.

There are many details to it, details that can be ignored because it is not the reason for the painting.

The roses are Very Important to the painting. Carnations have their own happy prettiness, but roses are pure elegance.

Can I be finished now?

Nope. Here is some self-talk: Study the photo of the painting, evaluate the things that matter, speculate on what could be better, touch up those little items, strengthen the contrast, soften the irrelevant parts, and don’t sign it until you have taken it to the nth degree.

Yes, I know, the painting has come a very long distance from its humble beginning of red blobs, seen here. But the fat lady has not sung. (Someone bring her another cookie, please.)

 

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.

 

A Special Commission

If you have followed this blog for awhile, you may have noticed that I have a slight touch of a Cat Disorder. Nothing crazy. Trail Guy brings sensibility into my life, so we only have 3 cats. (We’ve had as many as 8, but that was short lived.)

Some dear friends who live far away have an unusually personable cat named Zelda. They sent a few photos, and I put all jobs aside to work on this one.

Everything else had to wait.

 

ONE MORE THING:

BOOK SIGNING SUNDAY, APRIL 24, THREE RIVERS HISTORICAL MUSEUM, NOON-4 PM. I will be joining Bob Kellogg as he signs his book “Adventures in Boy Scouting: Tales by the Old Scoutmaster”.

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.

Productive Painting Day

Look at all these canvases! It is time to figure out what to paint of Mineral King in order to have inventory to sell at Silver City Mountain Resort, more commonly known as the Silver City Store, informally called by locals, “The Store”.

First I randomly chose a variety of sizes. Seven canvases seemed like a good number to begin with, 6×6″ up to 6×18″, including 8×8″, 8×10″ and 10×10″.

Then I sorted through my photos and chose subjects that were familiar and added a few more scenes that I haven’t tried before. Some will need to be cropped or stretched or somehow manipulated to fit the chosen canvas shapes.

I put a little bit of another base coat to help me remember which scene goes on which canvas. 

But, there are other jobs to be attended to while these seven dry.

Mañana.

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.

 

Sidetracked and Distracted

Since we are nearing the end of my favorite time of year, I thought I’d give you a break from watching painted flowers develop and show you a bit of the rest of my world at the time I was painting that bouquet. 

There are many distractions when one works at home. 

First, my neighbor has this incredible plant, and I don’t know the name, but the deer haven’t eaten it yet, so I NEED the name, because I NEED this color.

The mail came, and it contained a package of 2 new yarns. I haven’t talked about knitting for awhile; didn’t want to lose any more readers than I’ve already lost because the emailed subscriptions don’t show photos on people’s phones. (Still unsolved; my web designer is still too busy.)

The pinkish red yarn might exactly match the few remaining flowering quince. As a self-proclaimed color junkie, I had to check, and yeppers, it matches. (Destined to be a baby blanket).

I also needed to know if the lavender matched my blooming lilacs.. Nope, not quite. This one is destined to become another sweater that I don’t need; my knitting is a continual triumph of hope over experience, just like my gardening efforts. Sometimes I get lucky and all the parts work out. Usually the sleeves are too tight or too loose, the buttons keep falling off, the ends don’t stay woven in, I find a dropped stitch after wearing it several times, the collar won’t lie down, it is too short and fat, it is too long and tight. . . you get the idea. (Baby blankets always fit their recipients.)

I really did have some work to do that day. When one is an artist in a small town (the sign for Three Rivers says 2600 but I don’t know if all those people really live here) where one’s life overlaps with friends on many levels, one is often privileged to help out. This was fun, but definitely best viewed from the back of a fast horse. (Would take too long to explain and I’ve already stretched your attention span by going on and on about color and knitting.).

On one of my trips back to the house (a 30 second trip on the Zapato Express*), the light was beautiful on the hillside.

The green and the wildflowers are so fleeting; my daffodils no longer look like this.

So, even though all this distraction and sidetraction (that’s a good word, don’t you agree?) is taking me from my real work, I believe that it is an artist’s obligation to absorb as much beauty as possible whenever it is available. That’s part of the business of art.

*Zapato Express means I walked.

Blogiversary Bonus

What is a blog? It is a web log, an online journal, shortened to blog. 

What is a blogiversary? It is blog anniversary.

Yesterday was my 12th blogiversary. That is 12 years of posting 5 days a week about the business of art, life in Three Rivers/rural Tulare County, peculiar sights, a (rare) visit to another place, things I learn, and always, Mineral King. That is approximately 3,350 posts.

Today I am just giving you some photographs of beautiful things in my little world. It has nothing to do with the business of art, other than an awareness of beauty which I believe is the basis of good art (“good” as I define the word).

 

Thank you for hanging with me through the years, or thank you for joining up somewhere along the way.

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.