This year I have only been working on The Cabins of Wilsonia drawings and a few commissioned paintings. I don’t have any new paintings for a calendar.
On my computer there are 21,500 photographs. With the help of my husband’s honest and strong opinions, I have chosen 12 of those photos.
Now, I seek your opinion.
Shall I turn these into a calendar? Or are there enough calendars out there in the world? You all know me as a pencil artist, a painter, and a portrayer of the beauty of Tulare County. But, will anyone care enough to buy a calendar from me of photos of Tulare County?
It includes Sequoia, Mineral King (duh), and Three Rivers. Yes, I occasionally go to Visalia or Exeter, but please forgive me for not including either of those locations.
Thank you for reading, for considering this question and for responding!
LATE BREAKING NEWS – Great positive response from you all! The calendars will probably be between $20-25 and that will include shipping. They will have staples for the center instead of the spiral thing. The paper might be stronger than last year. They will have squares for writing. The folded size will be 8-1/2 x 11 (like copier paper). And Mary Jo, I will look through my photos and see if there is something that fits your very good suggestion. Katie, I’m with you – would love to do a year of nothing but fall photos. . . might be a bit too odd for normal people. (We’re special, don’t you know?)
“Sisters” took a long time to paint. The customer hired me because she liked my precision, and she gave me all the time necessary to complete this to both of our satisfaction.
When I paint, I listen to lots of things. There is music, podcasts, talk radio, books on tape, and voices in my head, including my own.
An aside: Someone said we should talk to ourselves the way we talk to our best friends. You know how sometimes you say things to yourself like, “How could you be so dumb?” (Maybe you don’t – please just play along for a moment. . .) If your best friend did something dumb, you’d be more likely to say, “That’s okay – stuff happens and we can learn from it.” Or, “Don’t worry about it – it is a small thing that can be fixed.”
This is what I have chosen to believe and follow:
I am a studio painter who works from photos.
Good paintings take a long time to finish.
Precision and accuracy are attractive.
I love detail.
Here are what the voices in my head have been saying, and here are my new responses in light of my recent decision (see the September 12 post):
VOICE #1 – “You are drawing with your paintbrush”.
Me – “So what?”
VOICE #2 – “If you paint standing up, you’ll paint with more energy.”
Me – “If my foot hurts, I will paint with more pain.”
VOICE #3 – “You need to listen to cool music while you paint, jazz or classical”.
Me – “This is a great time to listen to talk radio, podcasts about the business of art, interviews with artists and authors and inspirational speakers, sermons I’ve missed from my pastor, and audible books.”
VOICE#4 – “Real artists don’t paint from photos.”
Me – “Okay, I’ll be a fake artist.”
VOICE #5 – “You need to step back from your painting to see how it reads from a distance.”
My – “Thanks for the reminder. I am so into the detail that I forgot!”
Loves Cotton, Loves To Knit, oil on wrapped canvas, 8×8″, $100
I began oil painting on March 8, 2006. Sometimes it is hard, sometimes it is really hard, once in awhile it is fun. Sometimes I even like a painting or two.
Oak Grove Bridge, 6×6″, private collection, 2013
2 classes at Michael’s (the craft store, NOT my husband!), 1/2 semester at the local junior college, reading books, watching videos, reading websites, following artists’ blogs, looking at paintings, asking friends lots of questions, painting and painting some more. . . what am I trying to accomplish here? Just trying to “find my voice”.
Paint looser. Paint tighter. Hold your brush like this. Stand to paint. Use only flat brushes. Use only the primary colors. Use every color you can afford. Never use sap green. Sap green is the best thing that ever happened to a palette. Never use black. Of course you need black! Paint on location. Forget about painting on location until you are further along. Just get the impressions down. Decide which edges need to be sharp. Paint in layers. Finish a painting with thick paint all in one session. Copy the masters. Work from your own photos. (“All realistic artists either work from photos or they lie about it”. –Jack White) Working from photos is horrible – no real artist would ever do that!
The conflicting noises are confusing me tremendously. Secretly (well, not any more now that it is on the blog), I’ve just wanted to return to the quiet of my studio and draw with my beloved pencils. Black, white, shades of gray, detail to my heart’s content, straight edges, measuring tools, magnifying glasses – PRECISION.
Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to a book called Start, by Jon Acuff. He delves into the stages that used to accompany a person’s decades: 20s – Learning, 30s – Editing, 40s – Mastering, 50s – Harvesting, and 60s – Guiding. (Sorry, those of you in your 70s and 80s – Jon ignores you, but I’m guessing that Guiding or perhaps Super Guiding might be the role then.)
No longer are people doing these steps in these particular decades. Instead, people are starting new careers and learning new skills at all ages. (I was 45 when I started oil painting, in case you are wondering.)
So, I’ve re-entered my 20s when it comes to oil painting, struggling through the Land of Learning.
A week or two ago, I decided I must have entered the Land of Editing. Why? Glad you asked! (All interviews either say that or “Great question!” It is better than saying “you know” twelve times a minute.)
I have decided that I WANT to paint detail and precision, using lots of layers, following similar principles that I apply in pencil drawing. I am editing out the noise that does not move me closer toward this goal. If I have to raise my prices, so be it. The paintings will be worth it.
Denis Millhomme is one of my painting heros. When I asked him to teach me, he said he didn’t know how, and that if he drew, he’d draw just like me. I’ve wanted to paint like Denis from the beginning of this journey into oil, and I know I never will (he has a huge head start!), but I can stop trying to be like all those painters who slam them out quickly. Denis doesn’t have to, and neither do I. So there, all you noise-making folks. I get to choose how I want to paint, and I believe I have now chosen.
Worth It!
This is one of the paintings I did where I took all the time I wanted, striving for perfection. I like it a ton, and so do the wonderful people who bought it. (Try not to lick your screen, ‘k?)
Big fat happy THANK YOU to those of you who return to my blog, over and over.
Based on some emails I’ve received, it is time to go over a few things to help you enjoy this blog.
1. Some of you have asked me how to comment.
This is tricky. Some of your computers don’t show the same page view that I see. There is a sentence at the end of each post that reads “Be the first to respond” or “no responses yet” or “# of responses so far”.
This is true unless you are my amazing friend Nikki. I don’t know why her computer shows her a different view. It isn’t personal. Computers are just weird like that.
If you click on those words (hover over them – see your cursor turn into a little hand? This means you can click on it), it will give you a window or a box or something that allows you to type in your comment or question.
Then, it will probably look as if it didn’t work. This causes some people to submit two identical comments, because they think the first one didn’t work. Don’t worry – it goes into a spam folder, and then I go find it and approve it. If you submitted two, I delete one. If you misspelled words, I fix them. I’m just weird like that (sort of an auto-correct function that comes with my brain.)
2. Some of you only care about a particular subject, such as Mineral King, or drawing lessons.
You can either type the subject into the search box (if your computer is kind enough to show it) or you can scroll down the main page until you see the word “Categories” on the left side; just click on the particular Category that interests you and you will get pages of post headlines, most current on top. You can click on the headlines that blow your skirt up.
3. Several of you have had a little trouble on the main website with the shopping cart. You click on a buy button, and nothing happens.
How annoying! This is because after you choose what you want to buy, you need to click on the word “Cart” at the top of the page. That will show you what is in the cart.
Okay, hope that helps. Feel free to try the cart (you can always close the page if you didn’t really mean to buy something), try the commenting system (you can always close the page if you didn’t mean it), try the Search box, or try clicking on a category that interests you.
Thanks for stopping by, thanks for making it to the end of this instructional post. Here is your reward:
I’ve been getting the message from several sources that my prices are too low.
My subject matter is Tulare County, and most of my customers are here. Because we are poor, fat, undereducated, breathing bad air, and accustomed to frugality, I price my art work accordingly.
Common art marketing wisdom says that if your prices are too low, people will not value your work.
Common sense says that if your prices are too low, you will stay poor.
Contradictory common sense says that if your prices are low, you’ll sell more and more people will buy your work and then you will raise your prices and have a following who are willing to pay your new prices.
Common sense is uncommonly confusing.
(“Too many cooks spoil the stew” or “Many hands make light work”? “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” or “Out of sight, out of mind”? See what I mean?)
This little 6×6″ painting of Sawtooth is $50 plus tax. It is an original oil painting that took me about 2 hours to make. (First I had to buy the canvas, brushes, turpentine, linseed oil and paints.) When it sells at the Silver City Store, they keep a percentage, of course. That means I am earning a sorry hourly wage, particularly when you take the giant self-employed bite out of it.
Does this matter?
Not to me. I paint Mineral King because I love Mineral King.
However, I do need to earn a living.
I just looked up other oil painters. For 6×6 oil paintings, they charge $26, $65, $80, $100, $125, $150, $175, $190, and $325.
Holy Cow. Excuse me, I need to go do some more thinking. Might need to knit a few rows to calm down, have a hit of chocolate, pace, rock back and forth while banging my head on the back of the chair, perhaps even put my thumb in my mouth and curl into a little ball.
In the last century, I began drawing people’s cabins in pencil while I lived in a cabin. These were mostly in and around Mineral King. My business name, Cabinart, was born at that time.
Houk, page 119, 8-5/8×6″, $52
About ten years later, my friend Jennifer suggested that I make a book of drawings. Because this was all before print-on-demand, Amazon, assisted self-publishing, and all those other nifty tools, I called my cabin neighbor and friend Jane Coughran for help. She was a picture editor for Time-Life Books, and was thrilled to join me, as long as I allowed her to include historical photos. That decision took me about half of a second, and together in 1998, we published The Cabins of Mineral King.
Goldman-Davis, page 73, 9-1/2 x 6-5/8″, $63
All of the books and most of the original drawings sold. (You might get lucky on Amazon or eBay.)
Mann-Kennedy, page 114, 8-5/8 x 6-1/2″, $56
Now that I am working on The Cabins of Wilsonia, I am looking for more space in my studio for all the new drawings. Thus, I located 18 unsold drawings from the Mineral King book (more, actually, but the others are too big for my scanner, so I’m not showing them.)
Bissiri, rear, page 118, 5-1/4 x 6-5/8″, $35
These drawings are available for anyone who would like to buy them. Six appear in today’s post with a BuyNow button; the other 12 will be in consecutive posts.
Goldman-Davis, page 72, 10 x 8″, $80
The prices are well below my current (and even my former) commission prices because I want to sell them and because they are on odd sized pieces of paper that might be a pain to frame. I’ve put the name as it appears in the book, the page # from the book, and the exact size of the piece of paper it is drawn on, in case you get lucky and have the perfect mat and frame waiting for one of these original pencil drawings.
I have learned that the commenting system is irritating.
Mineral King sunset photo by Trail Guy
This is the procedure:
1. Click on “Be the first to respond” or “# responses so far”. This is at the bottom of the post.
2. After you type your thoughts and submit or enter (I’m unclear because as the “administrator” of the blog, it doesn’t ask me for this step)
3. It goes to a Spam folder, and then I have to mark it “not spam”. After that, it goes to a pending folder, and then I have to approve it. THEN it appears!
The commenting system isn’t very good. My own replies go to the spam folder and I have to do the process with them too. It also doesn’t give anyone confidence that their remarks have gone through.
Oh, and you might suspect this of me – I correct your typos, and remove anything that I deem too personal for the World Wide Web. (Please feel free to correct my typos too!)
It might be possible for me to change the annoying characteristics of the commenting system. However, my attempts might break the whole blog, so let’s just limp along with the current method for now.
What do you think? Want to try responding to this?
P.S. If you don’t see your comment for awhile, it might mean I am in the Land of No Electricity or Internet. Eventually I’ll catch up with you!
You “MUST” be on Facebook/LinkedIn/GooglePlus/Twitter to be considered a serious promoter of your work.
Oh yeah? Do I really need more time on the computer, with “virtual” friendships?
Are these Giant Sequoias having a water cooler conversation? Four Guardsmen, pencil on paper, 11×14, unframed, $175
I’ve heard that Facebook is like the backyard barbecue, another one whose name I’ve forgotten is like the bar scene, and LinkedIn has been compared to the water cooler.
I chose LinkedIn, because the barbecue is too big and feels like a waste of time, I don’t like bars, and having not worked for big companies, I’m curious about the proverbial water cooler. (Ever seen farmers on the side of the road, their pick-ups side-by-side in opposite directions, windows down as they chat? That’s their water cooler.)
LinkedIn is a bit of a puzzle to this simple rural artist. I haven’t yet concluded if it is helpful, or if it is just another distraction from being in the studio. It takes so much time to follow the links, find people’s websites, examine their work, comment if they have a blog, and for what? Are other artists truly my potential customers? And as a definite regionalist (referring to my subject matter), is anyone outside of my area truly a potential customer? Do these people in Minnesota/Washington/New Jersey care about Mineral King or Sequoia or Wilsonia??
Sure, it is fun to be asked to join people’s networks, and I feel warm and fuzzy to see that I now have 120 connections. But why? I’m not having personal conversations with these folks. I’m not looking for a job, which seems to be the primary function of this virtual water cooler place.
I’m always hoping for sales and for commissions, but doubt if this is going to happen from clicking “Accept Invitation” or “Send Invitation”. And that seems to be the motivation behind every person’s request to join his network. We all want sales – we are in business, and businesses exist to make a profit.
On LinkedIn, I am somewhat active in an Art Business group. So far, I have picked up a few tips, commented occasionally, and enjoyed some good virtual conversation. This is conversation minus body-language and vocal inflections, so who can say how authentic it is??
In Mineral King, we seek authentic conversation with real people, complete with body language and vocal inflections. Sunshine at the Neighbor’s Place, pencil on paper, 11×14, unframed, $175
In this Art Business group there are many beginning artists, seeking answers and help. (Most established artists are too busy working to be spending time talking to strangers on the computer. Yikes, what does this make me?) So many commenters obviously don’t take the time to reread what they have written – the typos almost give me a rash at times. It takes time to weed through the dross.
I pay attention to those who are articulate, friendly, professional and thoughtful. This sometimes causes me to look for their websites, which is a little tricky and time-consuming on LI. (lots of clicking and link following and window opening) Again I ask, “Why?” Is this my version of reality teevee, am I just procrastinating, am I seeking like-minded colleagues or do I just want to find a secret recipe to success by copying the business practices of Someone Who Gets It?
I could buy Linked In For Dummies. If I read it and followed its recommendations, would I begin to sell more work to strangers?
I’d rather be drawing, painting, teaching, or blogging. When I’m not doing those things (i.e. WORKING!), I’d rather be knitting, gardening, reading something, or hanging out in Mineral King.
