I looked at this painting and decided it could wait.
Instead, I decided to work on the marmot.
And then the deer.
Finally, I wanted to do something easy, so I put the first layer on these three paintings.
I’d call that a productive-enough day!
P.S. Probably shouldn’t have signed the marmot. His nose is weird. I didn’t sign the deer because his face is a little weird too. Probably should just stick to scenery and architecture.
Here is the afternoon’s painting session after a morning of exploring around Lake Kaweah. I’m easing into the production of Mineral King paintings, with the workshop doors open to the greenery, flowers, cats, and sounds of leaf blowers, chain saws, a distant donkey, and the occasional vehicle. March is a month full of distractions and temptations to lollygag. However, summer is coming and incomplete paintings will not sell.
It is efficient to paint the same scenes at the same time since the colors are mixed on the palette. Because this is the most popular scene to sell at Silver City, I paint it in multiple sizes and shapes, and at different times of day and in different parts of the summer season.
I was pleased to be able to finish these—see the signatures? The previous painting session did not yield anything that was ready to be signed. If I can get those 3 plus 2 from an earlier session detailed and signed, then I’ll be over halfway to completing the ten paintings.
Why ten? With the ones that remain from last year, this is a total of about 15 paintings. Silver City Store sells anywhere from ten to twenty paintings for me each summer. I don’t want to have too much inventory left at the end of summer. So I keep track as paintings sell, then paint more of the popular subjects that have sold out.
It’s all a guessing game, supplemented with a little bit of intuition and experience. That’s the business of art.
In case you have forgotten:
“Buckling down” is a weird expression. It reminds me of sayings such as “nose to the grindstone”, “shoulder to the wheel”, “eye on the ball”. . . How can a person accomplish anything in that awkward pose?
It was a beautiful early spring day (Yeppers, February is spring in Three Rivers).
After a fair amount of procrastination (all productive, of course), I finally moved myself into the painting workshop (the open door to the right of the studio, which appears to be leaning, but that was actually me who was leaning.)
Because these are so small (3×9”), I did my best to make them as realistic as possible without spending endless hours trying to copy the exact look of each flower. We’ll price them at $75 each and see what happens.
Then I finally returned to the Mineral King scenes that need to be completed by Memorial Weekend. I tried to be a bit looser than normal, and after I finish all 10 paintings, it will be interesting to see if I go back and tighten up the detail.
I think this one is finished.
These are not finished.
Heading back outside now. . .
This stack of ten canvases was staring at me accusingly. So rude.
The only way I could get them to shut up was to start working on them. I spread out the smallest canvases with their photos, mixed up a pile of sky color to cover eight of the beginning backgrounds, along with a nondescript dark background color for two that are different from my usual Mineral King scenery paintings.
The two Sequoia gigantea are finishing their drying session. No hurry; I delivered one still sort of dampish to Kaweah Arts, and these two are just back-ups.
Some of the canvases had a base coat, and last week I drew the basic shapes in pencil. I don’t always do this, but for some unknown reason felt compelled to do that last week. Maybe I just wanted to make the starting out session more accurate. . . maybe I thought it would make the paintings go faster. . . or maybe I just felt like drawing in pencil. Yeah, that.
As I was taking inventory of Mineral King paintings on hand, I kept returning to this 8×10” of White Chief, which was painted from a particularly dramatic photo taken by Trail Guy, early one season. The painting just didn’t slap me in the eyes like the photos do, so I guessed at what might make it better and then fiddled around with it a bit more.
Better? Maybe. Hard to say when the upper one was scanned and the lower one photographed with my inferior phone camera. If it sells in 2026, I will conclude that it has been improved. If not, I’ll just break all my brushes, slash my canvases, and see if I can find a job eradicating typos somewhere.
JUST KIDDING!!
Deciding what to paint for the Silver City Store this coming summer felt like a daunting task. There is no excuse for procrastination, and the better I plan, the better the sales. So, suck it up, Buttercup.
The first step in planning is to look at the available Mineral King paintings. (For my out-of-the-area readers, Mineral King is a beautiful alpine valley in Sequoia National Park; each summer I sell art 4 miles below the valley at a resort in a little cabin community called “Silver City”.)
It also involves evaluating how many paintings sold, both by subject and by size. I am painting to satisfy a clientele, rather than just doing whatever “moves” me. Thank goodness it is all very beautiful.
This planning part isn’t so beautiful. It’s methodical, tedious, and would be easier if I had a crystal ball. Instead, I have records, intuition, common sense, and piles and piles of photos, both the paper variety and on the laptop.
It is helpful to line them out by subject and size.
It is also helpful to take a break and walk somewhere. (No powerlines in Mineral King or Silver City to clutter the views up there, because it is remote, the Land of No Electricity.)
Rosemary in bloom. . . so far this year, February has been impersonating spring.
Now I have ten new paintings to produce, ranging in size from 6×6” to 8×16” and 10×10”.
I’ve attached hanging hardware and assigned inventory numbers. Next I need to give them titles, such as “Sawtooth #209”.
Not really; I think it is only somewhere in the 60s.
On a sunny morning in Three Rivers, Trail Guy and I took a drive up the Mineral King Road to see how far we could get, and to see what the construction project looks like.
We only made it to the lower gate. Although word went out that the construction crew was on hiatus until the following week, that word was wrong. We had a nice visit with the gatekeeper, who said that she couldn’t keep us from going ahead, but that we would encounter large trucks at Lookout Point. Her job is to tell people that the road is closed, but she isn’t a sheriff. So, not wanting to get in the way, we turned back. We were disappointed that the construction crew was back. However, being mature adults, we soldiered back home.
I only took one photo. Even though it is very green out, this photo captures all the brown and gray of mid winter.
So, we came home, and I gave myself a dirt manicure. These pots contained sprouting daffodil bulbs, and I hope our gophers around here haven’t begun to appreciate them. Deer and gophers are capricious in their tastes.
Reader Marjie requested more cat photos, so Pippin posed for her.
Then I went into the studio to tackle the dreaded year-end bookkeeping. Tiresome stuff.
Tomorrow I plan to paint in Ivanhoe.
Due to the unstable and variable nature of my website (working/notworking/working/not working. . .), I may not be able to post anything on Friday. More will be revealed in the fullness of time.
Due to my limited capacity to tolerate both bookkeeping and tech phone calls, I will just hope the site works over the weekend so that I can show you Friday’s mural progress.
Before I finished layering the background things, I blew off any discipline about painting, ignored conventional wisdom about The Way You Are Supposed to Paint, and I launched into detailing.
When I draw, I work from top to bottom, left to right. This way I don’t rest my hand on finished parts, thus not smearing graphite around. So, in spite of generally painting from back to front (the farthest away thing like the sky first, moving forward toward the closest objects), sometimes I resort to drawing with my paintbrush in places where there are enough layers to warrant the detail. This means the left side of the canvas might start looking pretty good while the middle and the right side still resembles a dog’s breakfast.
I couldn’t see very well with the doors open and bright light behind the canvas, so I rotated it. Hence, the colors appear to have changed. (Did anyone notice this?)
Bark on trees, more branches, better grasses, humanoid becoming more human (and now wearing shorts), more leaves, more this, that, and the other thing.
It was a very satisfying afternoon of painting (and only a little mosquito slapping.)
HEY, SEARCH ENGINES, IN CASE YOU ARE LISTENING, THIS IS A PIECE OF CUSTOM ART, AN OIL PAINTING OF A MINERAL KING SCENE. (Just in case there are a handful of folks who wish to join my tens of readers and see how a painting is built by this regional artist, this self-trained, user of a paintbrush like a pencil.)
WHAP, SLAP!! WHY are there mosquitos still plaguing me in November, for Pete’s sake?!
The threat of rain prevented me from beginning on Friday. More relevant:the powers that be did not offer me a key to their building, which means I can only paint on Fridays. This coming Friday I will be setting up for the Holiday Bazaar, and the following Friday is part of Thanksgiving weekend, with no idea if the library will be open. So, why start and then wait 4 weeks before continuing??
This custom piece of art, a commissioned oil painting of a Mineral King scene for a customer we will call Mister while not assigning any pronouns in order to protect anonymity, is starting to come together enough that I am no longer questioning the wisdom of accepting the job.
You can see the difference in color below because the sun was behind the hill. The inferior camera phone makes adjustments for low light, while changing the color. I sat down to work on the foreground, to get the darks and lights in the right places, hoping the colors were good (are shadows blue? purple? or just darker dirt and darker grass colors?). Tricky stuff to paint in low light.
I got tired of slapping mosquitos so I stopped after here. (Stopped painting, in hopes that I could stop slapping.)
I am still somewhat apprehensive about my ability to create a humanoid which is not only believable, but recognizable.
But it is too soon to worry about this. Actually, why worry at all? Instead, I’ll continue to paint.
I considered making a list of everything remaining, but it is too soon for that too.
On Monday, you saw this version of the custom oil painting of a Mineral King scene.
Next, I put more paint on the sky and worked more carefully on West Florence. (The humanoid is still a mess.)
Time to rescue the humanoid from embarrassing me. Wait, time to rescue me from the embarrassment of the humanoid. Something. . .
What’s different here? A little more background spots, using dark green and the grayish blue/bluish gray of West Florence.
Let’s make like a tree and leaf.
More color and texture on the tree trunks.
Something… Oh. I moved the tree on the left closer to the viewer.
In spite of using Trail Guy as a human-size model in the scene, I’ve decided to make the human larger in the painting.
Many more leaves, branches, trunks, grasses, and trail work to go before getting into the nitty-gritty of putting the correct human in the painting. That is going to stretch my skill to the nth degree.
Here is my usual collection of thoughts about custom art: This is too hard, I’m a washed-up has-been, why does anyone think I am qualified? And: These people are counting on me and I’d better get started because it is going to be hard and take a very long time. Finally: Just paint, you Goober! You know how to do this!
This is what you saw at the end of Monday’s post:
I started with sky because it is the farthest away, then put another layer on West Florence.
Sometimes I turn the canvas sideways because I can better control the brush and see it better for certain areas.
Here I started putting more paint on the trees. I’m also just planting them where they look right to me. The actual tunnel is kind of a mess, hard to find individual trees. If I painted more loosely, I could just slap on spots of various shades of green and then put in hints of blue sky beyond along with hints of tree trunks. But then I wouldn’t have gotten this job, because Mister likes my style of painting, not that loosey-goosey style.
This must have something changed for me to have taken another photo. Oh, I see that I tried to take some of the ridiculousness away from the humanoid-like figure.
More tomorrow. . .