This is a completed drawing of a Wilsonia cabin. I couldn’t decide if this post belonged here on my normal blog, or if it belongs on The Cabins of Wilsonia.
The drawing won’t be in the book. Those pages are already designed, and this cabin has its front door represented in the chapter of Park Road.
Knowing the drawing won’t be in the book freed me up to put color in the flag. I love doing that!
A wise colored pencil artist taught me to NEVER draw a face smaller than an egg. I’ve passed that on to my drawing students. It is tricky enough to capture a likeness correctly with photos or people that you can actually see and measure. Try doing it when you can’t see the details. Worse, try doing it when you can’t see the details on the photo AND the size of the drawn face is smaller than an egg, and there are TWO of these microscopic faces in the pictures.
A friend brought me this photo and asked me to draw it for her. I’ve shot it holding it in my hand so you can see how small it is, and how small the people are, and how truly miniature the faces are:
Then she said, “I enlarged it for you in case that will help,” and she gave me this:
Blurry and pixelated is how the tiny faces appear in this enlargement. Notice that the enlarged faces are perhaps about the size of my thumbnail now. (I have chunky hands, but even my thumbnail is no where near the size of an egg.)
She said that her daughter, a long time drawing student of mine, begged her to not bring this to me or be crazy enough to ask me to draw it. She didn’t listen to her daughter, whose advice was based on years of listening to me.
I like me a good challenge. Because this lady and I are friends, I told her I’d try. What does friendship have to do with it? The ability to communicate honestly is EVERYTHING when drawing or painting commissioned art. EVERYTHING. Besides, she flattered me by saying, “I figured if anyone would be able to do this, it would be you.”
Flattery often succeeds in getting me to try things that I know are crazy-hard (unless it involves the possibility of bodily injury).
The plan was to get it laid out and then shade in the faces. If she didn’t like the faces, I could just stop without having invested hours and hours. “No harm, no foul” seems to be the appropriate cliche’ for this approach.
I told my drawing students. There were guffaws, gasps of horror, looks of incomprehension, several “but you always say to never draw a face smaller than an egg”, and maybe a couple of screams.
Here is what I did to show the customer:
Blurry and small, just like the photo. Lacking in detail, it is hoped that the angle of the heads and the suggestions of features will bring to mind the correct little humans.
What did the customer, the mother of my long-term drawing student, the friend with whom I must have honest communication say about it?
More will be revealed in the fullness of time. . .
Now there’s a title and a half!
Remember my amazing and very advanced drawing student, Wendy Miller?
Her show ends this coming weekend. The last day to view it at the Courthouse Gallery (at 125 South B Street in Exeter) will be September 29, 2013. The gallery is open from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.
Here are some sneak peeks at a few of her amazing pencil drawings. Some of the titles may have changed. (We had a fun brain-storming session in drawing lessons to come up with scores of entertaining titles, but Wendy may have chosen differently for the show.)
Does This Dress. . .?
Inside Out
(If you have southwestern leanings, this picture would be wonderful in your home – it is small, and I am sorry I don’t know the prices or size!)
Not Moving
(If you are even half as smitten by cats as I am, you understand this title.)
Not The Gateway
(This is because it is officially the “Pumpkin Hollow” bridge.)
Plums
(Did I mention that Wendy works in colored pencil too?)
These BELONG in your kitchen, dontcha think??
Reader’s Corner
(I would have called it The Knitting Chair myself!)
If any of you would like to purchase any of these drawings, I will connect you with the Awesome Wendy Miller.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Lean on Me, graphite on paper, Wendy Miller
Courthouse Gallery of the Arts
125 South B Street
Exeter, California
The Mineral King Preservation Society maintains a mini-museum inside the Honeymoon Cabin. Trail Guy and The Captain (frequently referred to in this blog) are both board members of the MKPS. Cowboy Bert and I help, because we are married to these board members.
Honeymoon Cabin, pencil drawing, $300, 11×14 framed, for sale here
What are these guys doing?
We nominated The Captain to be the official Straightener of Pictures.
This is the way a cowboy sharpens pencils.
One of my drawing students is so good that I asked The Courthouse Gallery in Exeter ( where I teach drawing lessons) to feature her in an upcoming show.
I’m defining “so good” based on several things:
The Courthouse Gallery selection committee asked her to show there in July through September!
We thought they were booked further ahead, but suddenly, we both felt some time pressure. We realized we would have to work together to get her work titled, framed and priced. We decided a postcard would be a good thing. We decided that scanning her work would be prudent. We realized that this could get expensive. We remembered that I have lots of mats and frames.
We had a lovely 1/2 day together, along with her daughter Jenna, digging through my mats and frames, deciding if any of them complement her drawings. We found several that worked. We scanned, we scrutinized, we did the work.
You will be seeing more about Wendy Miller and her work in this blog as her show approaches. Without giving away too much of her work, here is a teaser. (I want you to come to her show!)
“Hey Mom”
11×14, pencil on paper, by Wendy Miller, private collection
A list is coming. First, please enjoy this drawing of a Wilsonia cabin:
Turned out pretty well, especially considering it was another one of those cabins with cedar trees blocking much of its detail.
Here is the sort of thing that runs through my head while I draw.
1. Yea! This is #________. I’m on schedule/running behind/might be getting ahead. (A continual evaluation of my progress)
2. Why are there ALWAYS cedar trees blocking the views?
3. Persistent thoughts on a loop – one day last week I ruminated about whether it is better to have work at a gallery that doesn’t sell very well but pays reliably OR work at a gallery that sells but won’t pay. The answer kept returning to me that the lesser selling gallery was infinitely better. Do you know how awful it is to try to collect from someone for 3 years, someone who sneers at you and says, “Patience is a virtue, you know!” I hope you never have to know that firsthand.
4. I wonder if I am enough on schedule or possibly ahead of schedule in drawing for The Cabins of Wilsonia to take a day off to paint.
5. It would be nice to paint instead of making yet another trip to the sneering, virtue-spouting, non-paying vendor.
6. Maybe she’ll have a check for me this time.
7. I can always visit a yarn store afterward. Wool fumes are soothing. Alpaca is soothing. Lots of color and nice people are soothing. Soothing is good.
8. Now what number am I on in my drawing progress?
9. Hmmm, I think I have an idea for a blog post. I wonder if it belongs on my “real” blog (this one) or my new blog (the Cabins of Wilsonia)?
10. This is hard. Maybe I should just go to Chicago for a few days. . .
Fear is a great obstacle to creativity. This post lists common info about fear and a list of my personal worries (an easier word to stomach than fear, as if I’m not a Big Chicken).
Here is a list of random thoughts about fear:
1. The greatest fear that is most common to people is public speaking.
2. Fear of the unknown is another biggie.
3. “The only thing to fear is fear itself” has always struck me as mysterious, weird and hard to understand.
4. Fear of failure is another common thread running through life.
5. I’ve had friends say to me, “I only knit scarves; aren’t you afraid to knit a sweater?”
6. Seth Godin says that fear is what holds people back from making art – fears of vulnerability, being discovered to be a fraud, or not connecting honestly with people.
Drawing an entire book, The Cabins of Wilsonia, completely self-publishing (not assisted self-publishing like Lulu or CreateSpace), designing using a difficult program (InDesign is NOT intuitive and NOT anything like the Apple stuff I’m used to), marketing – all on a subject with which I am familiar in general but not specifically . . . that is PILE of unknowns.
Check out this list of worries:
1. While I spend a year on nothing but pencil drawings of cabins (reaching for a total of 230 with the start # of 86 on January 1, 2013), how will I earn a living?
2. What if the books don’t sell?
3. What if the originals don’t sell?
4. What if I don’t find a good printer?
5. What if no one comes to the book signings?
6. What if the economy tanks further and people can’t afford a luxury picture book?
What if, what if, what if?
If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a Merry Christmas.
I’m not done telling you about The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.
These are thoughts that struck me as I read through her chapter on happiness at work. (You can call me “List Lady” today.)
1. “Enthusiasm is more important to mastery than innate ability.”
No kidding! My drawing students who are unexperienced but enthusiastic often excel as much as those who come to me already knowing how to draw.
Gretchen says that if you pursue a profession that you love, you will be eager to practice more and thereby earn a competitive advantage.
Well, I DO practice. . .
Anyway. . .
2. “The brain is stimulated by surprise, and successfully dealing with an unexpected situation gives a powerful sense of satisfaction.”
I do love surprises. Not many surprises for me in pencil drawing anymore, particularly in drawing cabins. Lots and lots of practice there. My Very Wise Dad often said, “Life’s full of surprises”. Maybe there will be some as I work on The Cabins of Wilsonia.
3. “We tend to overestimate how much we can accomplish in an hour or a week and underestimate how much we can accomplish in a month or a year”.
Since one of “my galleries” sold a few paintings last month, I will need to take some time off the book to paint. This may cause me to be overestimating the number of drawings for February. (It is embarrassing to say “my galleries” – sounds so pretentious!)
4. “Research shows that the more elements make up your identity, the less threatening it is when any one element is threatened.”
DON’T TAKE MY PENCILS AWAY!! Just sayin’. . .
5. “. . . doing what you love is itself the reward.”
Covered that one on Tuesday.