It Is Finished.

(Seems like an appropriate title with Easter coming, no disrespect intended.)

This was a long pencil drawing commission – lots of emails, photos, sketches, decisions, waiting, and oh my, lots and lots of leaves to draw.

Here is a look, start to finish (minus all the photos, emails, changes, decisions, et cetera)

You can see that the customers chose neither A nor B.  C was a result of a photo I took at the orchard, because they wanted something that distinguished theirs from every other walnut grove.

 

Now it is at the framer, and then, finally, it will be presented to the intended recipient, who will be happily surprised. (I’m fairly certain he does not read my blog.)

Pencil Drawing Commission

Do you remember reading that I was doing a pencil drawing of a walnut grove, a commission, and was waiting for more information? I received what I needed, finished it, and now I am waiting to hear if the commissioning parties are happy.

So, I’ll show you another pencil drawing commission that I finished. The customer is very happy.

This was difficult. The size is 8×10, and that is really too small for all this detail. I did most of it underneath a large magnifying light, and resolved to stop offering the 8×10 size. It was a relief that the customer didn’t want the family sitting in the front yard – I would have just had to say a definite and resolute NO! The horses looked a little weird in the photo – as if they had horns or something. When I asked the customer why they looked so weird, she said, “Who knows? It is Oklahoma! Just make them look normal.”

Too funny – are horses weird in Oklahoma? Maybe in the late 1800s or early 1900s they wore ear points. 

I also wondered about the alternating colors of paint on the porch pillars. Red and white is my guess, but perhaps dark green and white.

Interesting pencil commission job – have I mentioned lately that I love to draw in pencil?

And here’s a little aside about living in Three Rivers: the customer/friend has been telling me for awhile that she’d like me to draw her old family homestead farmhouse. I saw her at the Post Office and reminded her. She was ready to begin, so she dropped it off in a special mailbox I have near the bottom of my driveway. We did the entire job without actually seeing one another in person – all email and drop-offs, no more chance encounters at the Post Office or on a walk. We live about 1-1/4 miles apart and often walk past one another’s homes.

In addition to loving to draw in pencil, I love living in Three Rivers.

Weird Connection

In 1994 I was commissioned by a woman to do 2 pencil collage drawings as gifts for her sons. Their last name was Dalton, and the young men had started a company to sell a special recipe of BBQ sauce, capitalizing on their ancestors, the notorious Dalton Gang. The gang robbed a bank in Coffeyville, Kansas and died in the raid, along with 4 innocent citizens. This incident in history is a huge part of the identity of Coffeyville, 125 years later. (It happened in 1892 – did I do the math right?)

In the past handful of years, I have become friends with a woman who lives in Coffeyville. (Yea, internet!) She is a writer and blogger named Cheryl Barker and this is the link to her site. When I learned where she lives, I told her about the drawings and she was very surprised that I had heard of Coffeyville at all. (She had never heard of Three Rivers, duh.) 

I told her if I ever found pictures of those drawings, I’d send them to her.

Last week I was procrastinating (quite productively, thank you for your concern), and decided to have another look. 

Wow, in the last century I kept appallingly horrible visual records of my work. Here are the two pencil drawings, after scanning the horrid photos and working a bit of photoshop magic on them.

P.S. I googled Dalton Wild Times Enterprises and found nothing.

On the Easels and On the Needles

This jalapeno is a commissioned oil painting. I’m happy with the colors and will be tightening up the detail next.
The Honeymoon Cabin is a very popular subject. This is from an early evening photo with heightened colors. The size is 8×8″ and will be $100.
Sawtooth is another very popular Mineral King subject. This is 10×10″ and will be $150.

And in case you were wondering if all I do is work, please be reassured that I always find time to knit. A friend is waiting for a new pair of lungs, and there will be a fund raising dinner with silent auction and pick-a-prize items. I made these 2 infinity scarves for the event, and the blue/red/brown one already sold! No worries, I have just finished a brown/teal and have a second one on the needles, which I might be tempted to keep. Kind of tempted to keep the aqua one, but my friend needs to pay for her lung transplant infinitely more than I need another scarf.

Oh wait – you need to see what an infinity scarf looks like, not just all the colors.

Forget it – this one is mine! (Okay, make a large enough contribution to my friend’s lung account and I will send it to you, but it better be a HUGE check – email if you’d like further instructions.)

 

Finished Oil Paintings

Did you think I had forgotten my promise to show you recently finished oil paintings?

Nope.

First, the commissioned piece. It isn’t totally finished, but I never show you the sides of the canvas anyway.

It is Oak Grove Bridge XX, which means #20, but is probably the 25th time I’ve painted it because sometimes my record keeping is not so good.

Now, the P Fruits:

6×18″, P Fruits, oil on canvas, wrapped edges, ready to hang, $150 plus the obnoxious 8% California sales tax.

And a Sequoia Gigantea, with the same information as above, except it is a Giant Sequoia tree.

Trading Water for Walnuts

This week I’ve set aside my current obsession of drawing water and begun a commissioned piece of a walnut grove.

This has involved several sketches, beginning with the page of the walnut grove as it appears in the coloring book, Heart of Ag for the Tulare County Farm Bureau (NOW AVAILABLE – WILL POST TO FOR SALE PAGE WHEN IT IS REPAIRED!)

This was a starting place. More ideas were requested and delivered. This is part of the business of art, the sorting out of details for commissioned work.

The response was, “This looks like a generic walnut grove, not like ours.” Hmmm, is there anything unique about your walnut grove? A barn? A creek? A canal, a ditch, a view? 

No.

I made a trip to the grove and found a teensy distinction between the customer’s grove and any other Joe Farmer’s grove. I can’t tell you what it is, because this is going to be a surprise for someone.

I can show you the beginning stages of the drawing.

 

Whole Lotta Oak Grove Bridges

Whole lotta bridges going on around here. All the Oak Grove Bridge, of course. 2 paintings, a calendar, 2 photos.

Samson was busy with other things (thank you, GE for babysitting) so I tackled the bridge again. This time I started over, working from back to front and top to bottom. This layering and layering and layering is called “glazing” in Artspeak.

The lower right corner is a mess. Real life is very messy. Most scenery is messed up with sticks, dried stuff, dead branches. . . and we don’t notice because we look past it to the good parts.

You can see the lower right edge of the photo is a mess, a tangled mess.

It isn’t finished here because I just flat don’t know what to do.

So, for now I’ll stop and just think about all the versions and how I’ve handled this corner in previous renditions.

Because I’m feeling more confident about the 11×14 commissioned oil painting of the Oak Grove Bridge, I decided to pull out the 24×30″ version from last year. I tackled it the same way – starting over in the farthest places, working forward.

Just like with murals, the larger, the easier. 

Weird.

Particularly Challenging Challenge

Oil painting is a real challenge at times. Getting the colors right in addition to the darks, lights, textures, shapes and proportions, along with seeing what is really there instead of what I think might be there plus adding and subtracting whatever is necessary to enhance the scene . . . it is just hard.

Then along comes a new challenge. This oil painting commission of the Oak Grove Bridge may take longer than any other previous oil painting. Let the photos suffice, although none were taken while claws and teeth were attached to my painting (or photographing) hand. In all the wrestling, a button got pushed on the camera that made the colors more vivid than normal. I’m surprised nothing got broken or accidentally painted or dropped.

While this Bengal bitey-boy-beast, AKA Samson, took a rest, I was able to work on the rocks beneath the bridge a bit, and also located the posts on the bridge itself. The customers didn’t give me a deadline, and they say, “No hurry” each time I see them. 

Good thing.

He Liked It!

The Commissioner and Mrs. Commissioner were very happy with their commissioned oil painting of the Kaweah Blacksmith Shop.

This little building used to be up the North Fork of the Kaweah where the Kaweah Colony was. The flood of 1997 took it away, and in recent years, The Commissioner and his wife bought the property and began learning about it. 

He liked this one too. This pencil and colored pencil drawing has a story to it, several stories, really.

I drew this from some photos taken at a friend’s farm yard north of Sacramento. The tires were taller than I am, and my friend said it is quite A Thing when one needs to be changed.

The piece in the Madera Ag Art Show got 1st place in Equipment and Machinery, but it didn’t sell. I showed it around for awhile and finally just put it in my studio. Classic example of what I like not resonating with the general public. . . sigh.

When I was scrolling through old emails looking for Mrs. Commissioner’s name because I forgot it (rude), I found an email from 2007 mentioning the fact that The Commissioner might be interested in this piece. There was no way I was going to call a stranger to ask if he wanted to buy a drawing, even a 1st place one. Not happening!

He is no longer a stranger, he remembered the woman who suggested that I show this to him (she died in a skydiving accident, so you can see what a memorable person she was), and he has very good reason to want this drawing.

That reason will remain a secret, because I am not in the habit of revealing personal information about my customers. I may be rude enough to forget important people’s names, but I have my limits on rudeness.

Painting My Favorite Bridge

My favorite bridge is the Oak Grove Bridge on the Mineral King Road. I’d link you to previous posts about it, but things aren’t working very well on my website right now. Besides, I already talk too much and take up too much of your time. Current “wisdom” on blogging is to only post once a week. My head would blow up if I did that.

Here is the gradual, incremental, snail-paced evolution of a messy canvas into a commissioned oil painting. 

IMG_5113 IMG_5114 IMG_5115 IMG_5116Thanks for stopping by and listening and looking. 

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

Samson wanted to help.

IMG_5119 IMG_5120I wonder if he got any white paint on the tree?