Testing, testing, 1 2 3 testing… Let’s see if my blog is working properly now. I don’t know if WordPress did something or if I did something or what, but it’s been annoying the heck out of me. My web designer installed the latest version, so let’s see if that fixed the problems. First test: see if it will make paragraphs again.

So far so good, but I won’t know for sure until I see the actual post. I’m back from a long weekend painting trip to Moab, Utah. The temperature was delightfully in the 70s, but the wind was outrageous! All of my paintings were sand blasted. Here’s an example:

Moab study, sand covered

I have to run. I’m crazy busy, trying to get ready for my Studio Sale here next Saturday. I figure it will probably help if I get invitations out before then. Next year I hope to have an organization person on board to help me with my office work (we’re going to trade for artwork). That’s the funny thing about us artists – we just want to make art and bury our heads in the sand when it comes to paperwork. Maybe that’s why my painting got covered with sand…

Another wild and crazy week. That’s 2 weeks in a row, or 3, I’ve lost count. Last week started with getting paintings photographed and finalizing plans for my 2009 calendar. The easy part is done now – I have gathered the 13  images I need. Now, I have to design it: which paintings for which months, how do I want to crop the images that aren’t in landscape format, which painting will go on the cover, etc.? Then I have to market it…

Thursday was spent doing more work on my calendar and preparing for an opening on Friday night at Pirate: Contemporary Art in Denver with Claudia Roulier and other friends from our salon group. That evening, we all met at the gallery to hang the show – I entered 3 paintings.

Late to bed, early to rise, and off to paint all day Friday with my landscape-painting class at ACC (Arapahoe Community College). The weather had changed to fall all of a sudden, and we were absolutely freezing. But, amazingly for me, I stuck with it…and I actually enjoyed it again! What’s up with that? My hands were so cold and I was shivering so badly that I could barely mix my paint, and then I could barely aim my knife properly to put the paint in the right spot on my canvas or move it the way I wanted. But, I hung in there and finished my painting before running to my car and blasting the heater in my face for an hour while I ate lunch. This week we painted the same scene as last week, but we added color, indicating the scene as it advanced toward us from the sky/horizon to the foreground.

Back to the classroom to watch a video, then I buzzed home, fed my dog and headed for the opening downtown — I took Pasha with me, for I felt guilty after leaving her alone all day. That glass of wine was going to taste pretttty good! I called a friend on the way there to meet me for that glass of wine. I had her take a picture of me with my new painting, The Nightingale Sings, even though I had hat hair (hair spray can work wonders!) and was still wearing the clothes I painted in all day.

Alyson Stanfield, art-marketing guru extraordinaire, stopped by with her husband, Rod, to check out the show. He snapped this picture of us by my other paintings. She was pretty in pink.

I had to sit the show on both Saturday and Sunday and am finally getting my groove back today.

I was asked what it means to tone my canvas and why I do it. The mechanics of toning a canvas are to take some paint and mix it with huge amounts of paint thinner, and then brush it all over your canvas. This should be very thin. In fact, I often take a paper towel and wipe the entire canvas to make sure that there is no thickness of paint when I’m done. Now, the why:

There are two reasons that I do it: 1) it takes the fear out of starting a painting on a new, stark-white canvas; and 2) it leaves a color that will show through if your paint doesn’t entirely cover the canvas in spots. I sometimes deliberately leave holes in my paint so that the “underpainting” will show through. This unifies the painting, visually.

Then the question arises, “What color should the underpainting be?” Well, it’s mainly personal preference. However, here are things I think about when I am deciding what color to use.

- What is the overall color or “feel” that I want to emit from my painting when I’m finished?

- What is a color that would look good if it accidentally showed through in my painting?

- What color would look cool if I deliberately left flecks of it showing throughout my painting?

Here’s one where I toned my canvas with a pink underpainting and let the pink show throughout the painting:

Sometimes the color I choose is a neutral cool or warm color. Sometimes it’s a contrast color. For landscapes, I have often used a yellow ochre wash, with maybe a tint of another color here and there.

In the end, it really doesn’t matter what color you choose. Try a color that makes you feel good inside!

I went out happily to paint yesterday. I loaded my Artmobile with my new 48×48-inch painting, which still needed paint on the bottom (everywhere that the easel had blocked) and a signature. Unfortunately, with that in my car I couldn’t fit another big canvas, so I took a teensy 22×28 incher.

At the studio downtown, I painted the bottom edge of my yet-unnamed Ti Leaf painting, and then signed it. Next it was time to start my new painting. I toned the canvas and then started to sketch outlines on the canvas of what I had already designed in my sketchpad. Amazingly, I felt so cramped on this “tiny” 22×28 canvas and had a hard time translating my vision onto a small space. This one is trying to send me into uncharted territory. It wants to be an abstract, but “I don’t do abstracts.” So, do I relax and let it take me where it wants to go (and enjoy the ride), or do I make it be what I want it to be (struggling all the way)? When I put it that way, it’s a no-brainer. This is as far as I would let it take me:

Next week I will come up with something for this small canvas that “I can fit myself into.” And next week I will be able to get a 48×48 canvas into my Artmobile again and blast off with another “me” painting.

I went to paint at Studio 208 today and worked on my new “Ti Leaves” painting. The first thing I did was draw my painting on top of the value outline I did last week, which, as you can see, made it a total mess:

I then tried to honor the value scheme I had created, while working on the painting I wanted to end up with. This is a good experiment, and I have no idea whether I can pull it off or not. All the same, it’s fun trying something new, and I love working with flower and plant shapes! So, after two hours of painting, this is what I had:

I wanted to keep my white shape intact and make sure there was a pathway all the way through it. In other words, I didn’t want to accidentally cut it off by blocking it with a stem or some other line.

I spent the day yesterday PAINTING! FINALLY! Oh, it felt wonderful!! I’m working on my biggest canvas ever – 48″ x 48″. I’m doing a painting of ti leaves, and I’m trying something new. I designed a value scheme for the painting on my sketch pad and then transferred that to my canvas. You know, darks, lights, and mid-tones. I will now work my painting on top of that, using it to guide me, like a map. I’m not quite sure how it will work out, but I’m going to give it a go. Normally, artists do this in their original thumbnail sketch, but I’m trying it this way. It will be a learning experiment.

Unfortunately, the painting is so big that I won’t be carting it back and forth with me from Studio 208, like I normally do. I like to have my paintings around to look at and ponder over all week before I head back to Studio 208. I’m doing all of my oil painting there for now to keep the fumes out of my house while the weather is still cold.

My “Walking Midnight” oil painting is finished, but… The one thing I still want to do is soften some edges. I took it downtown with me last week and thought I’d accomplish that by painting a gray on the edges of my horse, thereby creating a soft transition. Wrong. I suppose that would work if I kept adding lighter and lighter grays until I reached the “edge” of the next color, but I didn’t feel like it.

There’s one other thing I might try, if I’m still feeling rebellious and don’t want to do it the right way yet. I can “drag” a new brushload of some of the dark color over the light, or vice versa, so that it skips over and doesn’t make a solid line. That will result in a soft, scattered edge, but I don’t think it will look as nice.

In the end, I’m probably going to have to break down and do what I know works: repaint both colors with fresh paint, and then take a clean brush and sort of “fan” over them lightly where they meet.

And next time, I’ll remember to do it while the painting is still wet! Any other ideas?

There, I’ve put the properly tilted hat on my daughter:

My daughter came by last weekend and we discussed the painting. I told her the things I still wanted to do, and she mentioned some things that she saw. After I do those few things, it will be time to look at the painting and see how I can make it a better work of art. To do that, I will put it in a prominent place where I’ll walk past it several times a day. Little by little, I’ll see things.

By letting it dry in between each painting session, I can always wipe off any new things I add that don’t work.

I went downtown today to paint with friends and work on my new painting, “Walking Midnight.” This one is very special. On my daughter’s birthday last August, we went to the stable and I took pictures of her with the horses all morning. The photo I chose to paint was one of her walking beside one of the horses. I couldn’t see it very well in my photo, so I went to the library to look for a better horse photo. I finally found one that I liked and used that horse’s silhouette.