“Cabin Art” or “Cabinart”* began with pencil drawings of cabins. It it a treat to be able to draw cabins when those jobs come in.
Someone saw a copy of my book The Cabins of Wilsonia and asked if I could draw her parents’ cabin, working from emailed photographs.
You betcha!
I showed it to you a bit earlier while in progress. I gave it my best effort to work from the customer’s photos and a sketch, and then sent her a scan of the almost finished drawing to her. She asked if I could add something that didn’t really show in the photos, a procedure that is almost always dicey. Since she communicated clearly throughout the project, I was willing to try.
Got it!
We talked about possibly having cards made in the future, so she paid the fee to do the digitization. Now you get to see what it looks like before and after getting digitally prepared. Something about scanning a drawing picks up every little anything that appears in and on the paper. Can you see the difference?
*It puzzles me that as a Typo-psycho, I never figured out how the name of my business should be spelled.
With much of the custom art that I do, I don’t get to actually see the places in person. This is less tricky than in the olden days of film cameras and waiting for pictures to get developed and then put in the mail.
Someone I’ve never met saw a copy of my book The Cabins of Wilsonia, went to my website, and used the contact button to ask me if I could draw her parents’ cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
(Obviously I needed my website redesigned to emphasize the fact that I make art people can understand of places and things they love at prices that won’t scare them – i.e. CUSTOM ART!)
As usual, I said I’d need to see the photos first. She sent me several.
This is the main view of the cabin, but I can’t see what is on the left or on the right.I looked at multiple photos, asked some questions, and did this sketch to see if I was understanding the missing parts correctly.
The customer sent me more information.
This sketch was helpful in understanding the chimney placement on the right.This photo helps me understand what is covering the chimney in case it needs to show.This still doesn’t explain what is happening on the left.
I began the drawing, even though I didn’t have all the answers yet.
The customer explained the trees surrounding the cabin, and there are 2 large sycamores very close, but not appearing in any photos that she sent. They sounded important, so I dug through my enormous stacks of photos and found some sycamore branches and leaves. These are drawn in the upper left corner because I want the cabin to look nestled and surrounded.I got a little nervous about putting in those sycamore leaves without first asking. For awhile, I procrastinated, just counting boards, measuring window panes, and growing ferns.
Finally, I took these photos and sent them to her. She was thrilled and I was relieved.
I asked again about the left end gable because it shows in the drawing, and I want it to be right. She responded immediately with this immensely helpful photo.
So that’s what’s over there!
Doing custom art of places I’ve never been to requires many photos, conversations, and sketches. It is a mystery and a puzzle, and when I am on the right track, it is enormously satisfying to grant the customer’s wishes and exceed her expectations.
I learned that the cabin owner was going to be present in Mineral King, so I put the “pedal to the metal” and finished the drawing late one evening in the studio in order to deliver it in person. The customer was very pleased and surprised.
There is a great deal of satisfaction and relief when I have a chance to redraw something from my Primitive Era. (That’s what my dad told me to to call my earlier artwork.)
The customer allowed me to put color in the flag, a technique that I am very partial to. I added smoke, scanned it, and did the Photoshop clean-up.
As I was adding the grassy meadow to the foreground, I was thinking about the first time I drew the Hockett Meadow Ranger Station. It was part of a notecard set called “Backcountry Structures”.
Back in the olden days (in the 1980s), people used pens to handwrite notes in cursive, put them in envelopes, address them, LICK a stamp to put on the envelope, and then place into a real mailbox for people in other parts of the country to receive.
How quaint. Those were definitely kinder, gentler, slower, more personal times.
Now, hold onto your hats, Dear Blog Readers, because I am going to show you something frightening.
Your Central California artist needs to keep reminding herself that it is good to be humble.
Growth is good.
People were very kind in the olden days and hadn’t learned all that anonymous internet rude behavior yet.
In 1992, I did this commissioned pencil drawing of a Mineral King cabin. The one who owns it sent me a photo of the card she had left from an earlier order.
Photo of little notecard
I tried to turn it into something that would print as a decent card. This was not acceptable.
Unacceptable!
The customer said she still had the original, and it wasn’t even in a frame, so I was able to scan it (after touching it up a little bit, because I draw better now (as one would hope, 27 years later).
Original drawing, retouched and scanned
Then, I messed with it on Photoshop Elements, and voila!
Ready to be printed.
Printing has changed so radically from the old days. I’m thankful that the ordering and reprinting process is accessible from my laptop these days.
On Friday’s post I said that the only way to get a copy of The Cabins of Mineral King, by Jane Coughran and me, published by Cabinart Books in 1998, is to get lucky on eBay or on Amazon.
Then I decided to look for myself. Nothing on eBay, and this is what was on Amazon. Whoa. Here is a screen shot of the first listings:
$85 is the lowest price for a book that sold for $50 as a hardcover, and this one says it is paperback??
Then I went down to the more expensive books. Check this out:
Now that is what I would call a Peculiar Sight.
I contacted the last 2 sellers on the listing to ask them if they really and truly meant to list the book for that price. I’ll let you know if I hear back. . . (and yes, I signed my name and told them I thought I did a nice job on the illustrations but their prices seemed a bit high.)
P.S.The seller called FastShip replied:
Jana, Thank-you for bringing this to my attention. We have about 70K books.
They went on with a lengthy explanation of how books are priced and how some fall through the cracks, but they didn’t say if they were planning to reprice the book.
In 1998, Jane Coughran and I published The Cabins of Mineral King*. Some of the drawings crossed over the center seam of the book to cover 2 pages. Some of the drawings were an odd shape to accommodate words.
This is one of those drawings (only photographed, not scanned and touched up for the web, so the background looks gray instead of white):
A member of this cabin family asked me if there were any drawings of the cabin remaining. I remembered this very large drawing with its odd shape. He and I looked at it together to see if it could be completed, and how he’d like it to be completed.
This is the result of that conversation. Highly satisfying! (but that little rude voice asks, “Yes, but is it creative?”)
*The only way to get a copy of The Cabins of Mineral King is to get lucky on Amazon or eBay. Good luck!
Someone’s Colorado cabin –definitely not small, rustic or rude
There are three distinct parts to cabin-ness:
The building itself – small, rustic, basic, simple, often without electronic amenities. (But wait! What about the cabin pictured above?)
The setting – rural, semi-secluded, in the mountains, taking an effort to get to (But wait! Have you ever been up Highway 180 to Wilsonia? And do these cabins look semi-secluded to you?)
A Wilsonia road
A Wilsonia neighborhood
The culture – slower, focused on people instead of technology; a place to play, recreate and relax, mostly outside; a place where meals and fireplaces become events in and of themselves; returning to nostalgic pastimes either of our youth or of some idealized youth of our parents and grandparents.
Outdoor dining is a big part of cabin life.
Napping is a big part of relaxing at a cabin
See? Outdoor dining
Even outdoor cooking!
Fireplaces are a huge part of cabin culture.
Eat and run??
It seems that the culture part is the strongest determining factor of cabin life. Some of our cabin neighbors gathered in another location for several summers, due to illness of one of their group. One of them told me, “We do Mineral King things in Seattle, and Mineral King is present with us there.” (I probably paraphrased it beyond all recognition – Forgive me, Sawtooth Six!)
P.S. Most of the drawings in this post are part of the book The Cabins of Wilsonia, available here.
The posts called Cabin Thoughts (Part One, Part Two, and Part Three), were popular among my readers, generating conversations through comments, email, snail mail, and in person. Now that our cabin is closed for the season, I’d like to share a few more thoughts.
A dear friend of many years, Natalie, sent these thoughts, titled “What a Cabin Means to Me”. (Nat, I did a tiny bit of editing – hope it clarifies rather than changes your intent.)
Secluded from the general public and hard to get to
In the mountains
Small and rustic, having only basic amenities, and no room for isolation.
Not a second home, but more of a make-do-and-relax kind of place where there is no television or phone service. A place where you interact with family and friends by sharing meals, playing cards and other games, sitting by a fire, hiking, and just cherishing the quietness of the outdoors.
Once again, mountains, small, rustic, games, firesides, food, outdoors, friends and family appear. I think Natalie’s ideal cabin would separate her family from outside influences, causing togetherness among themselves. This is a theme I found multiple times. . . a desire to unplug and simplify in order to focus on the ones who are most precious.
Our Mineral King cabin is definitely a cabin but varies from Natalie’s thorough and excellent definition in several ways.
It isn’t hard to get to if you don’t mind the poor road, and it is highly visible if you hike a popular trail. (This is the World Wide Web, so I am being vague on purpose.)
It is a second home to us, but not in the sense of a home with all the luxuries you may be accustomed to (our first home is purposely lacking a dishwasher, microwave, garbage disposal and heated towel racks, and we’re just fine, but thanks for your concern).
The cabin no longer has a telephone; we tell people to leave a message on the answering machine at home, and we use the cabin neighbor’s phone to check messages. (This makes up for 36 years of cabin neighbors using our phone.)
Neither one of us likes to play games; in the evenings we listen to the radio, Trail Guy reads out-of-date newspapers that friends bring up to him, I read library books and knit.
There is no single definition of “cabin”, but there is a feel to a place that makes it a cabin. I will share a few more ideas about it tomorrow. Then, maybe I will be finished with this topic. (No promises, because after all, my business is called Cabin Art.)
I looked up “cabin” on my Mac. The dictionary on my computer has fairly useless definitions as far as our discussion is concerned.
Cabin may refer to:
Beach cabin, a small wooden hut on a beach
Log cabin, a house built from logs
Cottage, a small house
Chalet, a wooden mountain house with a sloping roof
Small, remote, mansion (Western Canada)
Small, free-standing structures that serve as individual lodging spaces of a motel
Forget that. Where’s my real Webster’s dictionary?? Mine was published in 2004 rather than 1935. Oh good grief, look at this:
A small, simple, one-story house.
Willow Window, pencil. Is this a cabin? Nope, it is a bungalow. But it is a small, simple, one-story house. How do I know? Because I used to live there.
A few folks checked in with their thoughts on what a cabin is. One suggested “primitive”; another said a place to get away from every day life; a third (and someone else I talked to in person) suggests that a cabin is a state of mind, “non-fancy” is a good description, and someone else added in a description of an ideal cabin. She used the word “spare”, which could mean an extra home or it could mean without clutter. (I’ve seen some pretty cluttered cabins, and I have lived in a cabin when it was my only place of residence.)
Come back tomorrow for more thoughts on cabins and cabin life; clearly, there is no clear definition of cabin, but there are many ideas about it. Clearly.
