DGehman's Art Emporium

Good Old Walter Foster: How to Begin Painting for FUN

2010-11-05T19:35:00.001-04:00

Back long ago, Walter T. Foster published a large number of 10 x 14 inch books -- really, booklets, since most were 32 pages or fewer -- that covered many a subject around how to do art.

Walter is gone. Worse, his art collection appears to be gone, which is really unfortunate, since he lived his latter years in the art colony of Laguna Beach, California, and had a number of really good artists as friends. His collection was made up of works collected from his friends and on numerous trips abroad. A sad loss, a minor repeat of the library of Alexandria.

There is some good news: Walter Foster publishing is still alive and still publishing how-to art books, some of which are top-notch. One of the latter, How to Paint Plein Air Landscapes by Frank Serrano, is on its lugubrious, slow-footed Media Mail way to me.

But, back to the past.

A certain number of Walter's selections were what in our era has come to be known as shovel-ware. Remember when CD-ROMs were first being published for computers? A lot of them were randomly-gathered crap shoveled into then-wondrously huge receptacle of the CD. Walter's shovel-ware can be safely ignored, as it can be a mix of any or all of the following: haphazard, baffling, inadequate, badly dated, or only of historical interest.

But there are a number that are gems. One in particular is truly outstanding: How to Begin Painting for FUN, by [Estelle] Fedelle. (Walter did a lot of messing with fonts to make points, especially in titles. "Easy," "fun," "simplified," "pleasure," and other highly positive adverbs and adjectives are featured in many titles.)

Estelle is remembered with fondness in the posts in the Fedelle discussion area of AskArt: http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/bulletin.aspx?searchtype=DISCUSS&artist=11084549

Back when eBay was eBay, you could find this book(let) for 49 cents, or maybe 99 cents. Bookfinder.Com goes down only to $5.95, but that includes $4 shipping. Ah - I see one for 99 cents on today's ruined eBay.

I don't know if Estelle's nomenclature rhymed (esTELL fedELL) or whether it was esTELL fedELlee, but whichever, she's a mighty fine teacher. It would take you around a year to do all the exercises in the book, but it would be the equivalent of several years of art school.

Walter's organizational handiwork is usually either confusing, labyrinthine or just non-existent, so the tight progression of Estelle's book has to be her work.

It's a 2-part tome:
I. Drawing
II. Painting

Drawing
"Begin," she says, "with the big shapes." ("Most beginners start this way -- details drawn in too soon," she says. "Do big shapes first!")

She then presents composition of line, composition of values, composition of color, emphasis, and texture. Each has a little example -- and a strict, no-nonsense exercise for you to perform.

Covered are both quick-sketching and perspective -- the latter points to another of Walter's absolute top best books, Perspective Drawing by Ernest Norling, a name that students of perspective still mention in hushed tones.

Painting
After introducing us to the key tools, Estelle puts us through some tough assignments: smooth oil painting, looser landscapes, and yet looser palette knife, all in monochrome.

Finally, you get to color, and boy, are you put through the paces. From the 12 color wheel to color mixing, to color schemes, to which colors dry fastest... all the way through to styles from (again) smooth -- we'd most likely call this an illustrator's style -- to palette knife, limited color -- on to soft-edged or wet-on-wet knife, to realistic, stylized, traditional, non-objective, cubist, abstract, and collage.

Now, you do have to make allowances for dated things. There are a lot of Chinese figurines among the examples. Ethnic subjects, statues and figurines were a big deal from the 1930s through the 70s -- even much earlier, if you include the Impressionist adaptions of Japanese prints. In fact, you'd have to say that only three or four of the example paintings would seem contemporary to us. But, as Estelle would tell you, you aren't here for her art. You're here for your art.

The, the fact is, this thing is an art school jammed into 30 pages.

And if you think the following (the cover) is a simple-to-do color chart, just try to make that many regular rectangles with a palette knife!

Free PDF of Mike Rooney Demo - Interior Scene

2010-11-03T08:42:00.001-04:00

You're welcome to download a 16-page PDF report that I crafted.... er, wrote.... er, got down somehow, of Mike Rooney's October, 2010 demo at the Rowley Gallery (Orleans, Cape Cod, Mass.).

Download from here. <--- the word 'here' contains a link... this isn't very clear in the Foxfire browser.

The snappy title page:

Us, the audience, watching Mike at the gallery:

Mike adding some details:

One Fine Workshop

2010-11-02T20:38:00.007-04:00

This is a long blog post. It’s about a 3-day workshop I took, 10/25-27, 2010…

It was absolutely outstanding... three years of art school packed into three days.

It’s never that fitting to openly fawn over a new hero, but I’m getting old and it’s time to shed a lifetime of vacillation over who or what to back, by coming out in the open: I have a growing admiration for one of the workshop presenters, North Carolina painter Mike Rooney.

The admiration began almost a year ago with, first, some free art lessons videos at Jerry’s Artarama, a discount art supply house in Raleigh, North Carolina.

In those videos, Mike had relevant and clear things to say in lesson after lesson. About simplifying. About color in general and how to gray out color in shadows. About drawing in preparation for painting. About values, light and dark.

Even about how to pack a book bag for painting outside.

That led to my purchase of my first Rooney DVD, “Impressionist Beachscapes: Topsail Homes,” part of the World of Art DVDs sold by Jerry’s.

I bought it because (a) his little free lessons had revealed a damn fine teacher and (b) I wanted desperately to learn how to paint Sanity’s Anchor, a beach house in Duck, North Carolina, where good family times happened and for many reasons could never happen again.

The DVD turned out to be about color and light, not beach houses, and rather than disappointed, I was astonished. For well over an hour, he took a canvas panel from blank to finished work along an amazing path that went from nearly abstract shapes of pure color down to (relatively) fine detail in realistic colors.

For the first time, time and age were driven home to me. Time might tackle and disable me, long before I could master this process -- see the abstract shapes, see the underlying bright color, work the palette to bring those colors down to a bright, compelling scene.

I recovered a bit and decided to push on. Maybe I could learn some of it, anyway.

After All This, a Chance to See the Man at Work
All this long-distance admiration for Rooney was cemented in person, at a 3-day workshop at the Portsmouth (Rhode Island) Arts Guild (PAG), October 25-27, 2010, “Painting Loose and Colorful.”

Mike taught two days of the class, with Rumford, Rhode Island artist Kathy Weber taking the last day. (A few days later, a Rooney demo in a little gallery in Orleans, Mass., further cemented my hero worship, but that will be another blog post).

The first day, mostly sunny and definitely warm and pleasant, was spent indoors at the Guild’s digs. The PAG home is in what appears to be an 1880-ish one-story building, all dark wood and art-background-gray walls inside, with a largish central room that had been turned into a little gallery.

It all began pleasantly enough, with Mike giving a little preamble that made values (dark, light and in between) absolutely, unmistakeably clear – tempting to say ‘in black and white,’ but the whole purpose was to see not just black or white, but several grays in between.

He gave us a memorable shower analogy: just as a shower head delivers more water to horizontal surfaces and less to oblique or vertical ones, so too the sun bestows more light on the horizontal.

I found myself hoping that the Chinese kids who assembled these reflectors were paying attention to good UL manufacturing processes, that they hadn’t left some loose wires to short out across the metal....

Mixing 5 Different Shades of Gray
The next step was ours: create shades of gray from white to dark, and put some value studies down on canvas -- or, rather, practice paper.

We seven students, six women and I, burned our little brains – at least I did – trying to come up with five reliably different shades of dark color on our palettes.

The sixth, white, was easy, since we all had a tube of that. The first, darkest dark was easy -- just mix ultramarine blue and orange.

But the others! Add some white... too light... add some color... too dark.... add some white... too light....

A second challenge was to loosen up and squeeze out ample piles of color as raw material. I really learned that one by the end of the day – it being too hard to stop and try one more damn time to come up with five reliably different shades of dark…

Then we burned our brains further by looking at colored blocks and trying to determine were the darkest darks lurked, where the lightest lights, and what in between were the right values. I set my digital camera on B&W and did a bit of cheating:

Meanwhile, squinting into the sunlight outside whenever I came up for air, I inwardly seethed. The Weather Channel was quite clear that tomorrow was going to be foul and on Wednesday, we were going to be inundated with drenching rain. I wanted to do some painting outside with expert guidance.

The Red Plastic Look
At one point, we broke out our bits of red plastic (a tool that, looked through, strips color from scenes and helps reveal values) and subjected some of the PAG work hanging on the walls around us to an on-the-spot value study. There was quite a bit of good stuff.

But, the real work was ours. Below is my setup, complete with one of my monotone block studies. You can see my much-modified, ultra-cheap sketch box in its mostly finished form. The dark color (“black”) was a mix of the ultramarine blue and the orange that you see at 11 and 11:30 o'clock on the palette.

Four o'clock rolled in, it seemed, instantly, and we packed up for the day.

Day Two: Sunny - Forget The Weather Channel
And, of course, Tuesday arrived. There were a few clouds, but the day was in fact mainly filled with warm October New English sunshine and blue sky. And these conditions carried clear through until the last hour of the painting day.

So much for the Weather Channel (and my Monday frustration).

More dark / gray / white studies filled the morning as we lined up along the bay at Portsmouth’s Island Park. (The "island" is Aquidneck, nestled in Narragansett Bay. It hosts down-to-earth Portsmouth on the north; giddy and posh Newport on the south; and Middletown, just north of Newport, neither giddy nor posh).

The sun, by the way, coming up right at us straight across the water, was a darn near unbearable shower head of light, especially glinting off the bay waters.

Luckily, there were cool things to see along the left and right shores: homes and cottages, jetties and docks, good old New England summer-scene backdrops that quietly radiated back to us the necessary really-dark, gray1, gray2, gray3, gray4, and white.

Mike began sketching a scene to our right.

As Mike pounded into us, really-dark, gray1 and gray2 were reserved for shadows. That left white, gray4 and gray3 to be used for things in the light. “Everything in reality is somewhere in between, so your job is to
decide which value out there can be shoehorned into one of the six values available to you,” he said. "Think of it this way -- I'm giving you only six values to work with. It's as though I gave you a hundred dollars for lunch all week. You have to figure out how to spend that money so you can get something every day. Same thing here -- you have to decide just which values to place where, so you can tell things apart and give the story of the painting."

The exercise helped drive home the reality of oil painting: everything depends on intelligent decisions around simplification.

The First 'Aha!'
At some time during this second morning, I had my first moment of aha! It came in the middle of Mike’s demo. Right around here:

As he was putting in the white ultra-highlights (which he held off till the last moments of sketching), it finally dawned on me that good paintings were the result of a carefully orchestrated range of values. Oh, I had known that, in my head, but his finishing highlights for some reason made it all completely clear.

Rooney - Value Comparison, Photo > Sketch
Here’s most of the scene he sketched, taken in black & white:

And here’s Mike’s value sketch (note how he edits out several houses to the left):

The First Promise of Color
The sun held for most of the afternoon as we moved to a fishing spot close to the northern bridge off the island. Below, Mike talks again of values. He’ll do a value sketch, he says, then he’ll begin to lay in color. It’s the first we had seen color in the workshop and it promised to be a big moment.

Below, the value sketch is just about finished:

A few moments later, as the wind was rising, he began to add color. At this point, Mike pointed out that colors have values, but not always in relation to their ability to be discerned by the human eye. That is, you can and should get the value of a color right, but two colors of the same value (say, one blue and one red) can appear distinctly different by the eye.

Note the light blue especially in the following two pictures—also the blue and the orange:

In black and white, many of the values merge together -- add color, and you can keep the right value, but make strong differentiations at the same time.

Enter the Clouds
A few minutes later the wind brought in storm clouds, and the Weather Channel was partially vindicated… but, it never rained until a tiny drizzle began an hour or so after we broke.

Below is my take on the same scene (after Mike – twice – urged me to lighten the sky… I finally took his advice. The dark spots in the sky are not attack helicopters, but bits of the Providence Journal that stuck to the painting on the way home):

Day 3 - Kathy Weber Handles Bad Weather and Jurors Jurying
Kathy Weber’s day, Wednesday, dawned -- or rather didn’t dawn -- with heavy cold drizzle and very dark clouds. But, once again the Weather Channel was knocked off kilter by our New England coastal forces. It was supposed to dump 2 inches of rain, but it never progressed beyond windy, irritating, heavy drizzle and cold.

The darkness of the day is reflected in the blurring in the following photos, where the shutter speed is too slow for either my subject or my hand. I didn’t want to use flash... too disruptive.... but should have.

The weather itself was enough to give Kathy pause – we all were hoping to paint outside again. On top of that, with us incarcerated, several PAG members appeared, intent on judging submitted work for an upcoming major exhibition at the Guild. Kathy soldiered on above the constant voting and sotto voce discussions muttering in the background. I don't know about the others, but it wasn't long before Kathy's presentation and the act of concentration on painting had me tuning the jury out completely.

Palette Expo
First, she gave demos of various types of restricted palettes (minimalist colors, yet capable of many mixed colors from those available).

She began with that of Anders Zorn (1860-1920), consisting of yellow ochre (an earth color), cadmium red light, ivory black (really, a very dark blue), and white. The result is a subdued palette, very reminiscent of the old Dutch masters.

She then demonstrated more traditional limited palettes, culminating in one with a cool yellow, warm yellow, cool red, warm red, cool blue, warm blue and white.Respectively, that's lemon yellow, cad yellow light (or medium cad yellow, more orange-y), alizarin crimson, cad red light, Prussian (or thalo) blue, and ultramarine blue.

The range of colors she drew from these limited hues plus white was amazing:

The Second 'Aha!' - How a Master Makes the Most of Limited Resources
That triggered my second Aha! moment - to see what a master could do with extremely subtle shades and hues, all drawn from minimal resources.

We then sweated out some still life setups designed to exercise us completely on the mixing of more or less subtle color and value shifts -- all from only a few basic tubes of paint. My banana-and-bowl turned out good, for me, though the green bottle ain’t so hot: The next one, cruelly involving a Victorian white pitcher, eluded me (but scroll down to see another student's brilliant take on the pitcher).

The Wrap: Mini-Critiques
We wrapped with a mini-critique. Kathy took the lead and presented a clean balance of praise for the praiseworthy and suggestions for passages that needed more work. I didn’t capture everyone’s candidates - by now it was very dark - but a few representative ones (even though blurry) made it through, and they will tell you how effective the workshop was.

My own critique-able painting was based on photos I took last summer, at one of the few working farms in Framingham, on the Balch land.

An amazing time, with great things learned - thanks Mike and Kathy!

A footnote on Mike's approach
Later, I asked Mike how he managed the eight of us. A couple were accomplished artists, gallery-represented and highly experienced. Others had mastered different media and were experimenting with oils. Some were beginners -- my category.

"If you had a twelve year old and a five year old," he said, "and you wanted them to set the table, you'd expect more out of the twelve year old. You can't expect a five year old to set the table as well as you would a twelve year old. you'd be happy to see the five yr old put the plate in the right place and get some silverware down.

"But if that's all the twelve year old did, you'd be very disappointed. They're both setting the table but you set your expectations appropriate to the age and/or skill level. It helps me keep in mind that some aren' going to be able to 'set a very good table' and to try to show them how to, while gently pushing the more experienced to go farther and expect more out of themselves, to get better."

And it worked, thanks to one-on-one time
In part, it all worked because both Mike and Kathy made the rounds as we were laboring to complete exercises. Everyone got one-on-one advice -- and challenges and pushes -- and everyone went away feeling that a whole lot had gone on in three days.

World's most modified paint box

2010-08-26T15:10:00.002-04:00

I own a paint box.

Not a "pochade box" or to keep it strictly Frenchified, 'case de pochade.'

What I have is a paint box. It was so named when it was new and never shall 'pochade' roll from my lips (or, more Frenchy, nose).

If you're not familiar with all this terminology, some time in the late 1990s or early 2000s, painters stopped using "paint boxes" and they stopped painting "outside." From that point, they use a "pochade" (po-SHAAAD) box and paint "en plein air" (enhhh plehhh I-errrrh). Well, let me tell you, Winslow Homer used a paint box, so I'm using one. He also painted outside. Some of the Hudson river school and later did paint "on location," which is a French loan word, but we don't say "ennnh lo-cah-see-OHHHN."

But back to the point.

The box was free from our local Freecycle group and had belonged to the donor's wife's uncle, a commercial artist from the 1930s to 1970 or so. The box is probably from the early 1960s or maybe earlier, and measures a little over 16 inches wide by 14 inches high by 5 1/2 inches deep. A decent size.

It appears to be a commercially-made box, but not mass-produced -- at least, it has generic (and historic) clasps, a cheap (and historic) solid plastic suitcase handle, and standard hold-opens like you used to see on some console record players of the 50s, the really cheap ones.

It has a couple of old Jamaica stickers on it:

The original owner did some modifications himself... replaced the totally inadequate small hinges between top and bottom with a sturdy, full-length piano hinge, and tore out some of the interior dividers (you can see their shadow on the interior shot above).

I began by re-asserting the assembly of the box by driving in extra screws in the frame, sides, top and bottom. It has no fancy joints and it was coming apart. Then I designed some needed alterations.

First, I had to do something about the panel slots. The originals were for 15 1/2 inch wide panels. If that was ever a standard size, it is no longer.

So I made an additional, movable slot dingus and set it up so that I could use it for 8 x 10, 9 x 12, and 12 x 14 panels. After arranging it for 8 x 10, I discovered that I could add slot-y bits to the other side of the divider and it would hold 5 x 7 inch panels on the side opposite as well. (This second set of slots becomes too small once you move the new divider further right to set it up for 9 x 12 or 12 x 14.)

Here's the new slot thingy:

And here are some 8 x 10s and 5 x 7s, stowed:

Fully armed, then, I can pack four 8 x 10 panels and four 5 x 7 panels -- or four 9 x 12 or four 12 x 14. This is plenty for me, because right now I'm good for at most two paintings outside -- 'en plein air.'

So, I'm more than set, until I build up my outside-painting stamina. Or, if you prefer, 'l'endurance pour la peinture à plein air.'

I added a tripod mount to the bottom after I obtained a beautiful old, 1950s, all-metal, REALLY sturdy Whitehall Traveler tripod by Quick-Set, also free from the local Freesource group.

Here, it's set up, but stubby -- haven't extended the tripod legs. The whole thing reaches high enough for me to work standing up, and I'm 6' 3".

You'll see some more additions in that last picture.

I added a palette, made from the bottom of a wine display rack being discarded by a local wine store (it was a very useful neutral gray-green color):

Here it is, stowed. The hole is not for the usual palette-on-the-arm -- it's just a way to lift the thing out of the stowed position in the box.

Then I discovered there was no way to hold panels while being painted. So I added a perfboard panel holder. It's fitted with two pins that slip into mounting points.

And a sophisticated doohickey holds the top steady:

On it, I mounted a removable panel hold-down:

Yes, that's a tongue depressor (AKA "craft stick").

The dinguses on the bottom of the panel holder on which the painting panel rests are nothing more than those beautiful Allen-head cap screws:

(You're looking from the top down toward the bottom here. The one screw out of place here goes into a hole in the top and becomes the handle for pulling the stowed panel out of the box.

The perfboard was -- as you might guess -- free, from the local Freecycle group.

For the interior, I made a custom cardboard box to hold paint tubes, so I could lift the whole thing out, place the tubes on the ground, and, hopefully, not step on them. Inside that is a sophisticated clear plastic divider, which helps keep the tubes separate. It's from a Fig Newton package.

See any trends here?

My total expenditure was around $4 for screws, plus a lot of time. Oh, and $3.99 for the Fig Newtons.

Maine Marsh 1

2010-08-23T16:00:00.000-04:00

A recent jaunt to Pemaquid Point and Boothbay Harbor with Kittie's sister and our brother-in-law Dan re-introduced us to some of the best of Maine's boreal landscapes... marshes among them.

Here's a Maine marsh.

First, the underpainting:

Not much to be seen here - just the darks in purples and greens - lights in yellows and light blues.

Here it is at around 90% done - some tweaks to do:

I'll do a bit with the ocean, and clean up the rocks, upper left, and the evergreen to the right.

The range of colors in marshland is incredible: yellow, yellow-green, dark reds, dark greens, a touch of sand, blues and mauves in the sky and the sky reflections.

Tahquamenon Falls

2010-08-13T13:35:00.000-04:00

Still in Michigan's UP (Upper Peninsula) here -- the beautiful upper Tahquamenon Falls. First, the underpainting:

Basically, this is mainly the values, though you see the green of the forest on the upper far side.

Here's mostly finished:

No, the water isn't brackish. The Tahquamenon flows through thousands of acres of cedar swamp and the cedar root colors the water, making it look like (some say) coffee or (others say) root beer.

There's a story around the viewpoint. I don't believe you can see the falls from this vantage point any more: down on the river back just downstream of the falls. There's a viewing platform on the high bank on the other side, and that's where modern photos are taken.

There's a trail worn into the escarpment on the left. It leads under the falls. And, here's an excerpt of a story I've written (copyright 2010) about one of our family vacation trips to the falls -- by day, we stayed at my grandfather's cabin on the shores of Lake Michigan. If you buy the painting, you get the whole story....

My mother must not have known what we were doing, she (with my little sister) looking at the Upper Tahquamenon Falls from the base of the path well behind us. The whole scene is hazy because it’s now so far back in time, in the mid-1950s, but the whole notion (if I’m remembering right) came from my father.

“What say we walk behind the falls?” he asked. There was a precarious path plainly worn into the escarpment, up along the talus of sand and fallen rock that was perched a slanting forty-five degrees. The talus connected the sheer cliff of sandstone with the coffee-colored water.

It was completely out of character. I must have gaped at him. He might as well have said, “Let’s ditch your mother, go into town, grab some beers and pick up chicks.” Did this happen? Or was it just some sort of dream, me sleeping in the car back to the cabin on Lake Michigan?

....

Beyond astonishment, I felt a pleasant mix of terror and excitement, seasoned with a little confusion at my father’s sudden boldness. I went because he went. After a while, maybe he kept going because I kept going. It was increasingly clear (as the water noise steadily became louder during our approach) that we were going where we should not be going. We were our own mob mentality, a two-person mob.

Behind the falls was chest-pounding loud, the escarpment vibrating under the flow of coffee-colored water. Today I look at the falls and, seeing that its bones are stratified sandstone, I wonder what we would have done if the falls had decided at that moment to step a yard or two upstream. It does that, now and then: sandstone is hardly the most coherent of rock. But then, we had not made the most coherent of decisions.

Under the falls, the path (forever in spray) was slippery with moss. My own chest was doubly pounding, once from the outside from the sound of the water, once from the inside as my heart dealt with my slipping feet. If I’m remembering this right, I was first along the path and under the falls, so once under, I had to wait until my father decided it was time to leave. It was a long time...

Toward the final Dune Cut

2010-08-13T13:23:00.000-04:00

A bit of a hiatus here, but the Dune Cut painting is pretty well finished:

While I did my best to loosen up (the entire painting is done with a brush 1"/25mm wide), this is still tighter than I want. It's almost 19th Century in feel, but the lighting is right and the sand, and the lake. We may never again get to the shores of Lake Michigan in the Upper Peninsula, but we can go there in imagination (and very often do.)

Beginning of stage 1

2010-07-30T09:34:00.000-04:00

The first stage begins the process of tweaking colors toward realistic ones. Here's where I am right now:

The sky is taking form -- but now I wait until it dries a little. Then, I'll lighten the yellow, maybe darken the blue toward the top and try to make the transition from yellow-mauve to blue smoother.

The lake is coming along -- again, a little drying, then a touch of peach color to reflect the sky.

The beach below us and in the distance has its initial laydown -- needs a little darkening.

The dune in front now has dark and light grass underpainting -- next for them is modeling using light and shadow.

The stand of jack pine and scrub has its dark underpainting -- modeling next.

Areas representing sand are next. Everything will depend on this.

Final touches, way into the future, includes the tiny details -- strokes that become blades of grass, tree trunks, splotches of shadow, skims of highlights.

Michigan dune - sketch and underpainting

2010-07-29T16:58:00.001-04:00

Mike Rooney, the master I am currently following, sketches in magenta. I've already tried to rebel against this, but it's by far the best sketch color to use on the canvas... warmth flows through all the colors you put on the final surfaces. Guru Mike was right - magenta is the way.

The next step is the first phase: the underpainting. Everything dark is deep purple. Everything in the lightest tones is yellow. Second darkest is blue. Second lightest is orange. Third darkest is green. In this instance, I've gone to grays for the third lightest... the white Michigan sand has a definite gray undertone, and I'm thinking this will help bring that out.

It's a bit hard to see right now, though you can make out the upper sky and the lake. The magenta and yellow will become a light mauve and hint-of-orange late summer sky. Orange and gray in the lower half are sand - we're looking at a dune cut from up on a slight escarpment... you'll see the beach in the distance below... along the right, a little burst of jack pine and scrub, and in the foreground, dune grass.

Full-bore Cape Cod School of Art example

2010-07-29T16:43:00.000-04:00

Here's an example of the full-bore Cape Cod School of Art approach, done by the woman who was the last to head up the school and teach the techniques in Provincetown, Lois Griffel. Her book, Painting the Impressionist Landscape, is quite good in its presentation of the laboratory-pure Cape Cod School approach. I have a copy and I've learned a lot from it.

She is a consummate artist. But the exaggeration of color in the 'pure' technique is not for me.

Stepping into a new world

2010-07-29T16:28:00.003-04:00

Since I last checked in here, I've begun a transition to a new approach -- for me. A while back, I began to look at the many free art lessons at Jerry's Artarama, a discount art supply in Raliegh, North Carolina. I found myself repeatedly feeling in tune with the lessons by Mike Rooney.

And Mike's work caught my attention. Not to mention his accent. It's almost as though he plays Andy Giffith show tapes at night, just to keep it fresh.

One thing led to another, and I ended up buying one of Mike's DVDs, one presenting Carolina beach houses, since beach houses are among the many things I want to paint. There are some great beach times with my sister and our families that I want to re-live. Bit by bit, things slipped away, and the beach times wound down and finally stopped... but, to quote the bartender in Irma La Douce, that's another story.

Anyway, the method that Mike presents on the DVD is his modification of the Cape Cod School of Art approach. In a nutshell, you exaggerate colors when you start, then cycle through spots in the painting, making colors more and more realistic, until you feel that you've captured the light bits and the effects you want.

The more he worked his way into and across his scene, the more astonished and excited I became. The play of light I was seeing unfold was exactly what I want to capture. I was looking at techniques and methods for achieving what I had - up to now - not been able to articulate or analyze.

Now, most of the students of the Cape Cod School pursue an exaggerated color sense, one that doesn't really appeal to me. To me it seems like a mish-mash of Monet waterlily colors hacked over with colors no eye could possibly discern. No shadow is left without fireworks explosions, no plane of color escapes stabbing brush strokes and violent juxtapositions.

But Mike's adaptation strikes me as the perfect balance between ultra-Impressionistic underpainting that helps make things pop, and realistic, tonal handling of colors that ordinary human beings see.

Find Mike's blog and paintings here. I've even committed to an actual, real live course with Mike in October, in Rhode Island, one that cost money. And, if I can sell enough work, I'll travel down to reunite with my Chapel Hill-based sister in November, and take one or two more actual, real courses at Art in the Carolinas in Raleigh, organized by people at Jerry's Artarama.

I'll be posting more shortly. I plan to present the stages in my own, beginner's take of the Rooney/Cod approach to a scene. The scene you'll follow is one from my adolescence, when my family vacationed at my grandfather's cabin on Lake Michigan in the Upper Peninsula - dunes (complete with dune cut) leading to the water on a late summer's afternoon.

Family Update: Welcome, Abigail... then, T.A.C. Colenbrander - an excursion

2010-04-20T17:59:00.004-04:00

A new family member... a new grandchild
Abigail Eileen Box, our third grandkid, was born last Monday. Tiny, Beautiful. Here's a picture of her. In it, 2+ year old grand-twin Elly has just had her hand grasped for the first time by Gail, astonishing and pleasing Elly. Gail is being held by Grandma. Meanwhile, grand-twin Ben looks into the camera and says, "Cheese!" And father Brian is, like me (taking the pic) highly amused.

Gail is of course beautiful:

A new painting on a design by T.A.C. Colenbrander

Colenbrander 1, 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm), stretched canvas Available in my Etsy store.

I've just finished a little 8 x 10 based on an 1890 (or so) wall charger from the pioneering Dutch art pottery firm, Haagsche Rozenburg Plateelbakkerij (Rozenburg Pottery in the Hague). The design, by Theodoor A.C. Colenbrander, is based in part on Javanese batik designs, in part on Japanese designs. The size of the original isn't given in my source, but it's likely at least 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter.

To extend beyond the round space of the wall plate to the rectangular canvas, I picked up some motifs and treated them in a batik manner, transposing and flipping them. I took the project on for two reasons - the design is magnificent, and I needed greatly to practice making brushes go where I want. There are lots of places to go in this design, and lots of sweeps, curves and jags - hence, plenty of practice.

If the following sounds as though I'm endangering my arm by patting myself vigorously on the back, remember that the design isn't mine. T.A.C. was a genius. Trained as an architect, he became friends with one of the founders of the Rozenburg Pottery, and that friend hired T.A.C. as artistic director, without a lot of previous work to show his metier. He eventually was separated from Rozenburg and drifted to Gouda, where he worked at several Gouda Potteries with more or less success (more artistic success, less people success) until he died in his late 80s.

The Gouda Potteries, really a group of potteries large and small formed around the Dutch town, came into being after Rozenburg. They primarily co-opted Rozenburg designs at first, hiring away designers and painters from the originator. Later, each developed its own patois or dialect and many of the resulting designs are truly wonderful. These companies produced wares from 1900 to around 1935 that are (a) commanding huge prices today and (b) being counterfeited and sold on eBay to record numbers of suckers. For the real thing, here's the best site on Gouda Pottery that I've found: http://www.goudadesign.co.uk/page1.html

Anyway, my work. Or, rather, Colenbrander's work.

At 20 feet, it's a marvelous abstract color study, golds, yellows, greens, blues playing across a grand, dancing composition.

At 10 feet, the plate form suddenly emerges, tightening and resolving the composition. The colors take on new life. But it's still an abstract, even when you know that...

At 6 feet, the incredible natural forms in the design suddenly jump out at you... iris and (?) orchids, a pond, tendrils and leaves, maybe even a tulip or two. At this point, it's clear that the design... well, it's hard to pinpoint who inspired what. T.A.C.'s work is definitely what we now call Art Nouveau (and The Netherlands call Jugendstil), but he was ahead of the curve by at least 10 years. It has Arts and Crafts elements. And some of his designs (not this one) have elements that 20 years later would be called Art Deco.

Close up, you see my brush work, and that's less rewarding. But, hey, the original has brush problems as well.

A sidelight from my past: the plates that T.A.C. designed for Rozenburg were hand-thrown. Most other Rozenburg and (as I understand, anyway) all Gouda pottery was slip-cast in molds. Interestingly, the process of throwing a plate on the potter's wheel is essentially different from, say, a vase or a bowl. Clay just doesn't want to make a vase or a bowl, so you have to control with your right hand while you shape with your left. In contrast, clay moves willingly into a plate... at first. As you finish the plate, you have to be really careful of the margin, the outer edge. The slightest over-working will cause it to slump and the plate is wrecked - after all, it's a horizontal slice hanging out there with no support. So, the process combines easy opening with a frantic, you-gotta-be-quick-and-confident moment at the end.

Oil Painting - Manoir Windows

2010-03-14T09:49:00.004-04:00

Oil Painting - Manoir Windows
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm), stretched canvas Available in my Etsy store.

Could be France, could be England, could even be 19th C. America.

But it's France, Annecy to be exact. The windows (especially the reflected sky and foliage) and much of the flowers are based on a glorious photo by Michele*mp, found here. Note the many deserved accolades her photo has received.

Thanks, Michele!

The stone window frame is from a detail in an etching by Samuel Chamberlain from around 1924.

Lisieux scene

2010-03-12T13:58:00.004-05:00

Lisieux scene
Unframed. Available in my Etsy store.
Oil painting based on a 1925 etching by Samuel Chamberlain; appears as plate 17, "Old Houses in Lisieux" in The Prints of Samuel Chamberlain

Couldn't help adding the window plants.

6 in wide x 12 in. high (15.25 x 30.5 cm) gallery-wrapped canvas.

Lisieux took heavy damage in World War II -- I don't know if these old houses in Chamberlain's etching still exist. Some ancient structures were restored after the war; more were replaced by 1950s French modern, a style that is not a high point in architectural history. Even if restored, there is almost no way to mimic the twists, sags, bends and warps that happened as the original green oak timbers dried and shifted.

Chamberlain's print, of course, is black and white; I've added colors that are found today.

Facade in Gaillon

2010-03-12T13:56:00.002-05:00

Facade in Gaillon
Unframed. Available in my Etsy store.
One of my oil paintings, this one based on one of the architectural details on plate IV of Samuel Chamberlain's Domestic Architecture in Rural France (1928).

8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.5 cm) on gallery-wrapped stretched canvas.

Brick and stone noggin (the fill between the oak beams and posts) turn this into a fascinating pattern.

Samuel Chamberlain - a newly-found source

2010-02-24T12:51:00.002-05:00

A long time back, I became interested in what architecture historians call "vernacular architecture." Old houses is the better term. The plain, L-plan Ohio farmhouses were the first, then my uncle's house in Canal Winchester, now on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Christian Gayman house in Canal Winchester, Ohio

Somewhere way back when, I took a blind alley down Frank Lloyd Wright houses -- but, of course, these aren't vernacular. Guess you could call them houses with a cultured accent and brilliant vocabulary.

Then came craftsman bungalows, which for years I thought were named by Sears, which sold kit houses in the early-mid 1900s and most of which were craftsman bungalows. In fact, they're out of the arts & crafts movement in the early part of the 20th Century, and most derive from medieval cottages.

I suppose that's how I came (during my days as a potter) to the making of hundreds of miniature medieval homes in stoneware. Most were modeled on slices of hills; some were flat with a base to hold potting soil -- and small house plants became trees.

(There's a side influence: a miniature porcelain incense burner, a model of Ann Hathaway's cottage, that my mother shared with me when I was small. Its wall height is exactly that of my stoneware miniatures, though it was not in my possession when I began the stoneware series. Mom and I cracked it by putting lit incense in it, so I was able to witness first hand -- and at my hand at that -- the creation of a "condition problem," that value-deflating attribute made famous by Antiques Roadshow.)

I recently decided to try painting houses -- bungalows, at first. I unearthed a paperback book I bought a long time ago for $8, Samuel Chamberlain's Domestic Architecture in Rural France, originally published in 1928. It has a subtitle right out of the 19th Century: "Sketches in lithograph, drypoint, pencil and wash, of small chateaux, farms, town houses, cottages, manoirs, windmiills, gates, doorways, details, etc. from Burgundy, Auvergne, Provence, Normandy, Brittany and the Touraine."

My copy is a reprint by the Architectural Book Publishing Co. in 1981 (ISBN 8038-1578-6.) You can get used copies of the paperback (published 1981 and 1999) beginning around $25 now, though someone is selling -- or more likely, not selling -- the 1981 paperback for $10,004. That makes 1928 first edition by Hastings House hardcovers a bargain at merely $508 (with stops at $950, $2,600, on up to $3,500.)

The drawings inside are incredible. I bought the book before I ever picked up a brush, because it contained my favorite genre (or dialect), medieval cottages. Some of these disappeared forever in the bombings of World War II. Now, after struggling with art for a while, I look at it and I see how mastefully Sam has delimited details through contrast, how he brings out the planes of the buildings and their irregularities. Interestingly, so many lean to the left that I wonder if maybe Sam had my problem, astigmatism.

Samuel Chamberlain was born in Iowa in 1895, lived for many years in Senlis, France, ended up back in the States teaching at my alma mater, University of Michigan. He finished his academic career at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a long way from Iowa. He'd been introduced to Europe while in the abulance corps in World War I, and he played among the luminaries of Gertrude Stein's famous gatherings of the 1920s -- along with another WWI ambulance driver, Ernest Hemingway.

After an enthusiastic reception of the pricey Domestic Architecture of Rural France, Sam apparently never missed a chance to publish book after book -- drawings, etchings, photographs (he moved from hand-drawn art to photography some time in the 1930s), cookbooks, local history. Famous for his archictural renderings, he produced hundreds of commissioned works that are finding their way on to the art market. He died in Marblehead, Massachusetts in 1975.

I'll be playing with some of his images using color sources both from contemporary postcards and photographs and modern pictures. It's not clear how many of his subjects were shelled out of existence in 1944-5, and many of them were already close to piles of rubble in 1928. However, I can find several survivors in contemporary photos, especially a goodly number from the town of Breton town of Dinan, which escaped war damage.

A mixture of half-timbered with brick and stone nogging, cut stone, and brick, they feature a broad range of roofs: thatched, tiled, and more. I expect them to be both challenging and fun.

A handful of new paintings

2010-02-12T11:19:00.001-05:00

First, a scene in our December deep snow.

It came to eye as I looked out the window over our expiring China Doll (Radermachera sinica) plants. Shadows of the ash trees that mark our property end ran across the snow in the low December sun - and then up the fence. The pattern and the colors intrigued me.

First, the finished painting:

6 x 6 in. (15.2 x 15.2 cm) original oil on gallery-wrapped cotton canvas. Unframed. Available in my Etsy store.

The day was brilliantly sunny, with plenty of blue in the snow and the shadows. The white fence was noticeably warmer. On the left, a wintering blueberry bush; at the right, one of our arborvitae.

Now, the first study:

Original oil. Small format art, 4 x 6 in. (10 x 15 cm), fine weave cotton canvas on archival paperboard. Unframed. Available in my Etsy store.

This study saw me trying the many refractive colors in snow. While the effect is good, I opted to go with more realistic coloration (Study #2).

Study #2:

Original oil. Small format art, 4 x 6 in. (10 x 15 cm), fine weave cotton canvas on archival paperboard. Unframed. Available in my Etsy store.

This coloration (minus the bright blue behind the fence) was my final choice.

And, finally, a bungalow:

8 x 10 in. (20 x 25.4 cm) original oil on gallery-wrapped cotton canvas. Unframed. Available in my Etsy store.

The first, and somewhat crude, of a series of planned bungalow paintings. I'll be doing them all (I'm pretty sure) in a painterly fashion... which clearly I cam still learning.

The bungalow series is in part an attempt to atone for having sawed off the overhanging roof all around our Ann Arbor craftsman bungalow, a crime against vernacular architecture. In a way, it worked out, since the buyer of the house put a second story on it, forever removing craftsman from its appearance.

Meanwhile, this tiny (and charming) bungalow clearly has a porch inspired by Chinese lines, as though the designer wanted a touch of pagoda overlaying the basic craftsman structure.

Marigolds and rose-of-Sharon contribute a touch of purer color. A painterly approach helps capture the personality: a little over-the-top, a little cute, but under it all, a lot that's solidly craftsman.

Gallery-wrapped stretched canvas allows you to hang the painting without framing. You can, of course, frame it yourself, if you wish.

Ain't new for the rest of the world

2010-01-10T07:49:00.000-05:00

My idea to paint on prints is not new, of course - I keep finding examples by others.

And I've run into some technical problems that require cash, and/or changes in the ambient conditions here in frozen Massachusetts... the key one is the support for the printed fabric.

Tried making my own... didn't work.

Tried foamcore... not to my liking.

A second issue is priming. The oil painting world's usual means, a brushed-on water-based acrylic "gesso," isn't workable for my inkjet printout, which is dye-based. The colors bloom and run in the gesso. A clear matte spray is the right thing (though perhaps not ecologically), and that will have to wait until it's warm enough outside to use it.

The support is almost certainly going to be good commercial mat or illustration board, and I'll pick up the idea again as soon as all the pieces are in place, the weather is warmer, and it's fully feasible.

Meanwhile, I still have plenty to learn about brush handling, color, and... and... almost anything you want to name. Shadows in the snow is my latest. I'm finally realizing that the oft-seen recipe to "add ultramarine blue" to shadow areas actually makes sense: it's the color of the illuminating sky. It's light that is intermixing with the dark of shadowed areas.

A new (to me) type of hybrid: print + painted

2009-12-16T09:49:00.000-05:00

I'm playing with a technique new to me:

work on the computer with an available image, lock down subject and composition
print the image on fabric
paint over the print

It's analogous to middle-class pottery decoration in the 19th Century, when potteries used mass-produced decals for the primary pattern on a piece. Then, skilled artisans would 'touch' the decal with hand-painted details. The result was a product that was affordable, yet (in part) still wholly original.

I've figured a way to feed my own fabric through my injet printer by laminating the "canvas" to a carrier piece of paper. I then mount it -- right now, on foamboard, but soon, on matboard, the heavy, stiff cardboard used by frame shops.

After using a clear sealer, I then pick up my brushes and oil paints and...

... give myself some practice in brush handling and color mixing
... give customers a (kinda) original oil painting for much less than a wholly original work.

An example

Here's a screen shot of the example image, a photograph with a Creative Commons release from the photographer glasseyes on Flickr.com. I was primarily attracted to the banding of sunlight and shadow.

Note that there's a planter with ornamental grasses between the two small trees; and there is no sky showing; and there is a potentially distracting highlighted large tree canopy at the upper left.

Here's the image as printed by inkjet. Colors are subdued because I am using plain fabric -- that is, not fabric that has been prepared for inkjet printing, with brighteners and other chemical layers.

Here's a first hybrid print + painting -- this one done by a bright brush. This type of brush terminates in a straight line. Note that I've added a sky, removed the grass planter, and simplified the woodsy background.

Here's a second hybrid, this one done with a filbert, a type of brush whose termination resembles a filbert nut -- rounded and flat. Here, a completely different sky - a range of hills in the far background - much different woodsy background.

The mauve bushes in the middle distance don't work (all they do is distract the eye), nor does the stark white on the tree trunks... I'll probably paint over these bits or just toss the thing.

A little more tweaking of this technique, a little more brush practice, and I'll be listing hybrids of this sort in my Etsy shop... meanwhile, any comments?

When a one-on-one restaurant tour leads to a landscape oil

2009-12-02T11:02:00.002-05:00

6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Unframed. Available in my Etsy store

Next door to the Framingham, Massachusetts main post office, there's a restaurant, once a proud showcase in the IHOP chain, blue from chain smokers, a favorite stop for EMTs as the elderly clients regularly needed them.

It then became an independent pancake house and grill, but never changed clientele. About a year ago, it closed and moved closer to dereliction -- a process that the independent management had begun by neglecting the physical plant.

Last Friday, walking back from the P.O., I went over to look in the windows. Somebody was renovating the place. Just then, a guy came out the front door -- at first I thought he was a workman, but it turned out to be the new owner. It's going to become a Mexican-Spanish restaurant.

He was exhausted, but urged me inside and began showing off his handiwork. There was nothing that he found to be usable inside that had not been adopted, re-purposed, spiffed, perfected. The solid wood wainscoting he had sanded (hundreds of feet of it) and set gleaming with new varnish in a mirror finish.

The granite buffet top was now his desktop in a tiny office, where his original drawing for the menu cover was drying on the wall. The rotting carpt was gone, the cement underlay acid-cleaned, an array of Mexican tiles in place, awaiting imminent setting.

Out back, he pointed out a stack of wood pallets from new equipment for the kitchen - he was going to use them. For something. He didn't know what, yet.

"Everybody here throws everything away," he said. "Where i come from, these would be anything from a couch to a porch to a house."

I asked where he was from originally. "Mexico."

Where? I asked. "Jalisco. You probably know Guadalajara - it's in Jalisco. I'm from the countryside."

The restaurant is opening next March. I went home and hit Flickr for Jalisco. One photo popped out, and it was available under Creative Commons. The photo by Wonderlane, intrigued me by its exotic colors - the river, the sky. And the exotic skyline... exotic to those of us around Boston, where skies are Canadian blue and rivers are granite-gray or sky-blue, and mountains don't shoot up vertcally and skim off their tops.

Wonderlane has a blog (much better than mine) here.

Experimental landscape: Sunflower fields #3

2009-11-24T04:01:00.002-05:00

6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Unframed. Sold.

Ground fog was lifting in the early morning sun as the Amtrak Empire Builder rumbled its way toward our first stop, Glacier National Park, after leaving Chicago. We were in our first day of our 12-day 45th anniversary trip.

It's a scene that I'll be revisiting many times. Everyone who was awake came to the windows on the left side of the train to exclaim over the beauty.

I'm pretty sure this is my third try in oils - this time with an experiment in removing detail. It still isn't the soft band of colors that I'd like, but we're getting there. #1 was claimed by Kittie; it won't be for sale.

Excursion - Rose in the style of Clyde P. Parsons

2009-11-24T03:42:00.001-05:00

6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Unframed. Available in my Etsy store

Again, trying to loosen up, work in a painterly style.

Claude P. Parsons (1995-1972) was a California artist who published two Walter Foster art books. This is a study of a still life in his How Claude Parsons Paints Flowers, one of Walter's best efforts. Claude's great granddaughter, Erin Jones Graf is an active painter in Wyoming (see her work here) .

The oversize booklet has some excellent paintings in a style reminiscent of Edouard Manet (to paraphrase van Gogh, only a few motions of the brush, yet a capture of everything about a flower). This, in addition to incredibly useful information on how to mix colors for flower painting.

Erin writes me:

He made his money (so that he could paint full time) working with Howard Hughes in the oil industry. I think he did that for around 20 years.... He then worked for a wallpaper company designing wallpaper prints, ...[later working] with Walt Disney, painting for Pirates of the Carribean in [the Anaheim] Disneyland. He stayed in LA and lived in Beverly Hills. After his first wife died, he married a beautiful girl named Virginia who was Greta Garbo's legs in movies (I guess Greta didn't like her own, or the producers didn't) He died in 72 of Leukemia.

Erin writes of standing close to Parsons paintings at her home as a child:

As far back in my life that memory allows, I remember perching my eyes ever so close to his strokes so that the only thing in focus was color and texture. I would then back away and be amazed at the simple image that could transpire from such complex rhythms of paint application.

Everyone's friend in adolescence, Holden Caulfield, talks about writers you wish you could meet, in Catcher in the Rye. Claude is an artist I wish I could have met. Few of his paintings make it to the auction market, probably because people hold on to them.

Claude's second Foster book, the improbably named Common Faults in Oil Painting, is on its way to me from a used book seller in Florida. Look for the eradication of common faults in what I do...

2 Experiments: Mount Baker from the Anacortes Ferry

2009-11-24T03:18:00.002-05:00

6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Unframed. Available in my Etsy store

6 x 5 in. (15 x 13 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Unframed. Available in my Etsy store

The sun was setting, literally in the sky and figuratively on our 45th anniversary trip to the Pacific Northwest in August, 2009. K. was writing postcards in the Washington State ferry's food court while every once in a while, I'd go out into the wind and cold to see what could be seen. We had left Sidney, BC on Vancouver Island, on our way back to the US mainland at Anacortes, Washington.

At one point, I stepped out and saw Mount Baker in the waning sun. I didn't know it was Mt. Baker until long after we got home. The air was clear enough that the snow-capped mountain looked to be a mile away, but instead, Baker was some 44 miles away.

Here are a couple of experiments. The first is a knife painting - the only brush work was the reddish glow on the snow mass, applied by brush.

The second is a brush painting - with a little knife work on the mountain's snow - another attempt to loosen up.

I'll be trying Mount Baker again, a stunning sight, as beautiful as Japan's Mt. Fuji.

Experiment: Whistleriana (Portrait of the artist's mum)

2009-11-23T20:04:00.003-05:00

6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Unframed. Sold.
After running across a photo of a yellow-gold chrysanthemum in my collection, I decided to have a go at it in oils.

The experimentation is two-fold. First, I need to loosen up, so I tried for a painterly approach.

Second, I wanted to get familiar with some new tubes of water-mixable oil paint. Winter is upon us, and we have to shut the windows and doors here in the Northeast. Fumes and odor from "odorless" paint thinner are more than we can take.

Water soluble oil paints allow me to keep working with the windows shut... instead of turpentine or odorless paint thinner, I can use water both to thin the paint and to clean brushes. Great invention.

As for the title, sorry about that. These things occur to me and then it's too late.

Experiments & Excursions... new Etsy shop section

2009-11-19T09:16:00.001-05:00

I'm putting together a new section of my Etsy shop - Experiments & Excursions.

Behind the move is a dual need. First, I want to stretch my capabilities by trying new effects. Second, I want to loosen up while waiting for enough income from sales to get larger canvases. The small size of the paintings that I do have a tendency to make me focus on small details, when I need to work more "painterly" and free.

A couple are ready to go and I'll be listing them soon.

About shop sections
Etsy allows each seller to add virtually any number of sections. They aren't anything except a handy way to chunk up our offerings into categories that we set up.

We decide what they are; we name them. They're just pigeonholes, hopefully to make shop navigation easier.

What to do with a useless teapot

2009-11-12T19:28:00.000-05:00

6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Unframed. Available in my Etsy store

This began as a small bouquet of late-summer flowers, picked when frost was imminent. I tossed them into a teapot left over from inventory in the late 1970s, when I was a potter. Actually it was a leftover mistake - the bottom was too thin, and I never put it on sale.

I had devised a rich glaze in an oatmeal color, with painted decoration in blues, blue-grays and muted turquoise. It was a hell of a good glaze, though I'm immodest in saying so myself.

The whole thing is set in Edouard Manet style - black background, polished mahogany table.

I think I was remembering the summer sun - look at those yellows!

Three poppies and two daisies

2009-11-12T19:23:00.002-05:00

One of the most engaging TV painting teachers is Gary Jenkins (and, when she's allowed, his with Kathwren). Gary specializes in floral painting. The Create Channel runs their series but won't re-run them. Omroep MAX, a public television channel in The Netherlands, not only runs their series when new, but cycles through ones from the recent past. And MAX puts each episode on its web site for a week, so you can watch all you want.

Out of this comes three paintings. The first is of Gary's original composition, with some additions on my part to cover up some less than great brushwork on my part:

6 x 5 in. ( 15 x 12.5 cm), original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Unframed. Available in my Etsy store .

The second was a slightly different aspect ratio, and I added a new poppy and played with the background:

6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Unframed. Sold.

Immodestly, this is one I like. Available in my Etsy store .

Then I had a shot at seeing the composition through the (imagined) eyes of Edouard Manet (1832-1883), who is not Claude Monet, gotta watch those vowels. Edouard was an inspiration and friend to Claude.

Here, in its mahogany and mauve glory, is the result:

(Sold)

No daisies, you say? Ed would not have painted daisies. He hated the country and daisies are country; he was a Paris boy through and through. Turning one poppy around, sort of a can-can view.

I added a Japanese fan. The fan was my grandmother's, brought back from a barely-operational Osaka by my father at the end of World War II. Dad was communications officer aboard a troop carrier that brought home thousands of soldiers as part of the Magic Carpet fleet managed by the US Navy.

One big scene and one tiny scene from Long Island

2009-11-12T19:10:00.000-05:00

Nope, not that one. Long Island, Maine.

It's a tiny island in Casco Bay off Portland. Kittie and I opted for a mini-holiday - drove to Woburn, Massachusetts, Amtrak train ride Saturday morning from Woburn to Portland, Maine - ferry from Portland to Long Island - and a great weekend stay at The Chestnut Hill Inn.Travel in reverse via the same means was on Sunday afternoon.

Since it was weeks past Labor Day - the end of the season - tourists were gone from Long Island. We brought in our own food (told our hostess, Carol Doughty, that we'd be bringing a chicken and an axe with us on the train.) Carol gave us the run of her restaurant kitchen, the restaurant being closed, and provided some great muffins and coffee the next morning.

We walked the half mile south to South Beach (no diets involved in this one), a huge expanse of granite sand. An empty expanse. We explored until nearly dark and the landscape below is one souvenir.

The wind was blowing fiercely, the temperature in the 40s, the water (strangely) almost calm. Record high tides the night before kept us from the foremost tourist attraction (beyond beauty) of the beach, the singing sands. They were too wet to sing (apparently the sand squeaks underfoot as you walk).

Cool colors, cool weather, cool scene.

Then with the light fading, we made our way back up the gravel road to the inn. Looking down, I saw an incredible play of color and pattern in the crushed granite - can anyone guess what underlies the island? - littered with fall leaves.

Both paintings are 6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Unframed. Available in my Etsy store .

The weekend was filled with friendly folks. A Long Islander driving up from the ferry saw us trundling toward the inn, dragging our roller suitcases behind us. He didn't have room for us, but he could take our suitcases to the inn. We then had a liesurely walk past permanent homes and neat little summer cabins.

His sister-in-law, it turns out, was a guest at the inn, and she took Kittie for a long stroll to meet several islanders as I trekked around solo to make photos of bits and pieces of the island.

Everything jibed. Amtrak's conductor was a hoot. The restaurant waitress on Saturday was fun, even if she didn't let me have the apple pancakes (we were too late for breakfast). People on the ferry - two stops at smaller islands before the mile-long Long Island - were (a) friendly or (b) fun to watch or (c) both. Our hostess at the inn was delightful.

Rain, which had been forecast to stream down in record amounts for both Saturday and Sunday, held off until Sunday afternoon as we were (after shopping in downtown) 25 steps from the Portland Holiday Inn. There the concierge called us a taxi to get to the train home. The taxi driver gave us a life tale that was full, but punctuated with depth. Matter-of-factly, he told us of the loss to cancer of his girl friend, about his many drives from Portland to Woburn, 100 miles each way, where the Lahey Clinic did what they could and then wrote off most of the charges because the doctor hated it that she had gone.

Highs, lows, friendly people, good food, human depth, human warmth - decompression at its best.

A couple of orchids

2009-11-12T18:40:00.002-05:00

I've carried forward the concept of orchid portraits drawn against a backdrop of their (original) natural habitat. I have two new ones.

Both are 6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Unframed. .

The first is a Miltoniopsis roezlii; behind it, Brazilian cliffs. Available in my Etsy store

The second is a Bifrenaria harrisoniae, nestled in a Panamanian valley. Sold.

Since the time in October that I painted these, I've been to my first orchid show, the Massachusetts Orchid Society show at the Tower Hill Botanical Garden. There, I came to realize two things.

First, orchids are three dimensional. They are hugely three dimensional... something not clear in photographs or in the small range of orchids at Home Depot and Stop and Shop. I have a lot of work to do, a lot of things to learn, if I want to fully depict this dimensionality.

Second, orchids are overwhelming in every respect - color, shape, plant habit and (for those with fragrance), their perfume.

Many at the show asked me if I were going to grow orchids. I mostly said, "I don't think so." Early this summer, I planted onion sets. A couple of weeks into October, I harvested onions that were smaller than the sets. Orchids wouldn't stand a chance against me.

Kancamagus Highway - birthday gift

2009-10-14T11:02:00.001-04:00

8 x 10 in. (20 x 25 cm) oil on canvas panel.

Once, a while back, Kittie and I drove the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire, about 26 miles of spectacular views of the White Mountains. Since we were there at leaf-peeping time, I mostly got to see the rear bumper of the RV ahead of us. This is one of the rare views, which I painted for Kittie for her birthday, so, not available for sale.

A stop in Whitefish and the addition of a private car

2009-10-11T07:12:00.000-04:00

Our Amtrak Empire Builder passenger train stopped just at deep sunset in Whitefish, Montana. It's a tiny town, but well known in the northwest (at least in the past) for its posh resorts and ski lodges.

It was one of the longer stops along the Empire Builder route, allowing train personnel to top up fuel and replenish food and goodies. Passengers can debark and stretch their legs. I didn't really need it - we had boarded at East Glacier (National Park) less than forty minutes earlier. But I didn't want to miss the chance to see us on the outside. Again. I hopped off the train at all of our longer stops.

So I wandered out onto the platform of the late Victorian (and beautifully maintained) train station. I didn't see it come up, but an old. wooden passenger car was being shuttled off a siding and staged behind our train by a switch engine. The car was ornate, old, gleaming in the lamplight. A party was in full swing, visible through the large glass windows. The music could be heard, rock-and-roll.

An Amtrak worker on the platform of the old car stood waiting for coupling of the car, so I asked him what this was.

"Private car," he said. It turns out that Amtrak will attach private cars to its scheduled runs, for a hefty fee.

"Look incredible," I said.

"It should," he said. "It was the private car of [here he inserted the name of a fabulous party-animal industrial tycoon of the late 1800s]. Crystal chandeliers, mahogany interior, even has a complete master bedroom suite with private bath and shower."

I didn't write down the name of the tycoon on my trip notes - I've been racking my brains and it may come back to me... but it may, and in fact probably, will not.

I took the photo which is the basis for my oil above, then watched as a switcher gently connected the old car. The 21st century rock-and-roll audible outside it was a strange, anachronistic touch.

As it turns out, the photo was not of the scene above. The Empire Builder swept straight off to the left. But the picture was so dark that a printout made the dark shapes of one-story shops along a street masquerade as our train. It looked as though our cars curved around to the right, pointing into the wall of mountains north of town. Only after I painted the little canvas did I revisit the photo and discover my mistake. Mistakes can make far more interesting pictures than reality...

A Flurry of Still Lifes and a Floral or Two

2009-10-05T22:25:00.002-04:00

A smattering of small paintings and (for me) a big one... at 8 x 10....

Beach Rose + Mini Landscape
6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Unframed. Available in my Etsy store
Wild beach roses are fascinating. They're all over the east coast, along beaches and dunes, bringing color and fragrance to the seaside.

The Web doesn't reveal their origin - or more precisely, my search skills didn't turn it up. The rose burst forth first in the Orient, Wikipedia assures me. It made it to England well in time for the War of the Roses, probably because finicky roses allowed a landed aristocrat to crow, "My gardener is better than your gardener."

But the beach rose is a blue-collar rose. It doesn't require coddling or attention. It grows anywhere, even (as here) in sand, beaten by salt wind and scoured by winter storm.

Did ours escape from colonial gardens? Did rose hips find their way into cargos from the Orient, back when Massachusetts blue-blood money was piling up, thanks to the 18-19th Century tea, porcelain and opium trades?

The little landcape here is of the beach-rose-lined walk that heads past Clarke Pond to Gray Beach, part of the Coolidge Reservation in Magnolia (okay, Manchester) Massachusetts. Only the outline of the foundation is left of the once-fabulous Coolidge mansion overlooking Massachusetts Bay - Boston is visible, and so is Cape Cod on a clear day.

Off Gray Beach is Kettle Island. Artistic license allows me to bring it a lot closer to make a sort of interesting background.

It's a great place to gaze at the Bay, and at the fabulous coastal homes in the area. And to ponder why the marble Georgian-style mansion existed for less than 50 years, built and later razed by the modestly-named Thomas Jefferson Coolidge. No, I dont know if he was related to President Calvin. Silent Cal, he was called. T.J. is silent as well, having passed away in the 1960s.

Bedding Dahlia Study
4 x 6 in. (10 x 15 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Available in my Etsy store

I'm planning to capture summer on canvas, as Fall grows on us in the Northeast. This is a quick study of a couple of our bedding dahlias, caught on a sunny day. Even at 6 x 4, they are painted larger than life size here... bedding dahlias are a grand, enthusiastic if tiny celebration of form and color.

Still Life with Gardenia

8 x 1o in. (20 x 26 cm) Painterly still life on commercial canvas panel. Available in my Etsy store

I'll be building my skills for years to come, if the time is allowed me. I'm happy with this one, which is sort of impressionistic, and it's a lot larger than most of my oeuvre.

The vase is a jar from my days as a professional potter in the 1970s. Its form is a cross between 19th C. American stoneware canning jars and Egyptian alabaster forms, both strong, expressive geometries.

By the way, in my future still lives, you'll see this jar in varying proportions - here, I've made it low, chubby jar. In real life, it's stocky, but a lot taller.

The glaze is the rich shiny red-brown of Albany slip, no longer mined; raw iron oxide dabbed on the pot under the slip blooms into a beautiful deep iron red in spots. The apple is a Gala, and its red bloom plays endlessly with bright yellow areas.

In the painting's background, I've played a little with complementary colors. If anyone cares, it's a tip of the hat to the improbably named Merlin Enabnit, who authored two very quirky books on color for Walter T. Foster.

(I like to tell people that I've studied extensively under Walter T. Foster. He produced hundreds of $1 how-to-paint books from the 1940s through the 70s - and his publishing house is continuing to offer low-cost painting manuals. Some of Walter's original line is quite good; some of them are just shovel jobs, many just galleries of examples of Walter's personal art collection or borrowings from earlier publications, without much redeeming pedagogic content.)

Still Life - Ginger Jar, Apples and Dahlia
6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Sold.

A little still life with another of my pots from my stint as a potter, 1969-1981 or so. The pot is this a white (actually oatmeal) glazed vase in the classic shape of a small Chinese ginger jar. On it is a leaf pattern in a soft cobalt blue, a mix of cobalt oxide, manganese carbonate and black iron oxide - and based on the natural cobalt ores of China, wih all the "impurities" that make it so much richer than the brash, blaring blue of pure cobalt oxide.

Michael Cardew, a great man and a British crafts potter from early-mid 20th C. described the role of the hands in wheel-thrown pottery. The right hand is controlling. Without it, the volume of the pot would disappear; the wall would simply slump. But the left hand, the one inside the pot, is the one that will confer life to the shape. A final, often whisper-gentle pass with the left hand alone will belly out the shape. This ginger jar benefited from Cardew's touch, with its gently outcurved sides.

Lying on the mahogany is an orange dahlia, which is about to find a home in the jar.

I took a shot at a Dutch-ish dark background. You likely wouldn't have a wall this color. But it's a nice gray.

Still Life - Apples and Stoneware Bowl

6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Available in my Etsy store

A Gala and a Honeycrisp apple cluster around a little stoneware bowl with only "USA 5 in." molded into the bottom. The rim is clear of the gorgeous blue glase, so these would have been stacked rim-to-rim, then foot-to-foot, then rim-to-rim and so on, many feet high in the giant high-fire kilns of (probably) an Ohio stoneware factory anywhere between 1920 and 1950.

The relatively tiny diameter would make it ideal for tucking in and around bigger pieces. They served to increase the density of wares in the kiln. You don't want open areas in a high-fire kiln, because there's a huge fuel economy gained when at white heat, the pots radiate heat to each other. They have to be fairly close together for that to happen.

I kind of like the polished mahagony table in this setting, a rich offsetting color for the apples who are basking (complementarily speaking) in the blue of the bowl.

Still Life - Mum in Glass Vase

6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Available in my Etsy store

I've just discovered Eduoard Manet, who is not - to the bane of all beginning art history students - Claude Monet (but without Manet, no Monet). Manet, with an "a", did incredible still lifes toward the end of his too-short life.

Ed copied Old Masters when he was starting out. Now he's the old master, and I'm trying to copy him. My effort is a little crude, but charming. To me, at least.

Under the vase, a white silk handkerchief with an openwork pattern, part of a collection from my wife's aunt. Aunt Tish never went a day dressed in anything other than crisp, classic and gorgeous high-fashion clothes, pointed up with carefully selected accessories. This is one of the latter.

Two Mini-panoramas from last summer's anniversary trip

2009-10-05T14:43:00.000-04:00

Another hiatus - and another update.

I make my own canvas panels from watercolor paper, acid-free glue and extra-fine 100% canvas in a miniature weave, AKA white bedsheet. Left over from each watercolor sheet is a strip 1 x 12 inches, and I've begun to turn these into 1 x 6 in. mini-panoramas.

The first - sunrise over the Columbia river.

1 x 6 in. mini panorama, oil on canvas board. Available in my Etsy Shop

I wake early, even on vacation, so I left our Amtrak Empire Building bedroom and made my way up to the observation car. I sat down next to a teenager. The sun was just giving a little color to the summer sky.

"You're up early," I said. Yep, he said. "And you're going where?" I and my sister are riding to Pasco. "Washington?" Yep.

He and his sister had taken the eastbound Empire Builder the week before, hopping off at Cut Bank, Montana, where their mother met them and drove them back to Helena, where she lived with her new husband. I miss her, he said. After a pause, he said, There's nothing to do in Helena. I was bored out of my mind.

"How old are you?" Fourteen. "Ah," I said. "At fourteen, boring is easy. At my age, nothing is boring. There is nothing you get to know enough about. There's always something new to dig into."

She makes the best peanut butter sandwiches, he said. I thought to myself that there is nothing to a peanut butter sandwich - what can you possibly mean? A year later it came to me: his mother made it. It was something in his life that he would now have only once in a while, and only after many hours by train and car.

The sun was now up and the train, having skittered catty-corner down from Spokane to Pasco, slowed to a stop. My new friend got up, woke up her sister who was sleeping across three observation car seats, and they left, saying goodbye.

The train pulled out again, following the Columbia river, wheeling directly east when the river did. The sunrise was magnificent.

Sunrise in Crofton

1 x 6 in. mini panorama. Available in my Etsy Shop

Later in our trip, having rented a car in Portland and visiting old friends who had moved from the Boston area, we stayed on Vancouver Island at a bed-and-breakfast in Crofton, British Columbia. The little town overlooked Saltspring Island, where, it turned out, there was a quirky but excellent little seafood restaurant. An hourly ferry took us less than a mile across Vesuvius Bay and we lucked into a seat. It was August 17th, our 45th anniversary, and the meal apparently was meant to be: we walked in just as someone on the phone group was canceling their reservation.

Our seat on the outdoor balcony overlooked the bay and the weather was perfect. At the table next to us (one table closer to the bay) was a couple celebrating their first anniversary. Next to us was a couple celebrating their one week anniversary. We all enjoyed the coincidences, even the people dining on down the balcony. A perfect evening.

The mini panorama is on the Crofton side, and the little bridge is part of the tiny town's Shore Walk.

Some new ones - mostly florals

2009-08-20T08:37:00.000-04:00

Some new ones...

Experiment with a genre used now and again by Gary Jenkins - floral with landscape vignette. In this case, the vignette is another scene of North Dakota sunflower fields taken from the train window on our 45th anniversary trip. 6" x 4" (sold)

The flooded quarry at Halibut Point State Park, Rockport, Massachusetts. The single red tree growing precariously in cracks in the quarry wall caught my attention. 6" x 4". Available in my Etsy Shop

An incredible gladiolus from our garden, a random survivor from last year... and from a random assortment. 4" x 6". Available; contact me for for more information.

Another random survival gladiolus, doubly incredible. I spent nearly two hours mixing purples until I achieved 0ne close to the original. 4" x 6" Available; contact me for more inforatmoin

Our glads and a hydrangea on a fence line graciously installed by our neighbors. 6" x 4" (Not available)

Long hiatus and a new direction

2009-08-16T10:17:00.000-04:00

Busy as could be, for months... I've taken a new direction, dabbling in oils, and will be posting new paintings here. Meanwhile, here are a few:

Perfect beach day, northern Michigan (6" x 4") Available in my Etsy Shop

Two rose of sharon (6" x 4"). Available in my Etsy Shop

Sunflower fields in morning mist - taken from the window of our train last summer on a memorable 45th wedding anniversary trip... by train from Chicago to Glacier National Park via Amtrak's Empire Builder, then on to Portland and finally up to Vancouver Island B.C.
(6" x 4"). (Not available... Kittie wanted this... she loved the colors of the sunflower fields.)

Red daylily and bud, abstract background (sold). (6" x 4")

At the moment, I put selected ones on eBay for a little more than the cost of materials. (Trying to keep the hobby self-supporting).

Small free collection of Art Deco Papers: Birthday gift from me to you

2009-02-11T12:28:00.000-05:00

Download the 5.4 MB paper pack here.

Contents:
Papers, all 12 x 12 at 200 dpi. They'll print just fine a 300 dpi.

They are variations on two basic designs

Based on a colophon,a stylized daylily in a circle, resting on a stylized stem with a flower bud on each end

Slate blue with creamy orange motif
Navy blue with blue and orange motif
Black with blue and orange motif
Black with white motif
Gray with slate blue and orange motif
Gray with navy blue and dark orange motif
Gray with light slate blue and orange motif

Based on a circle motif on the title page for "The Firefly Who Scattered Sparks":

Cream with orange and blue motif
Slate blue with yellow and orange motif
Purple with dark blue and dark orange motif

From the last freebie fast forward 30 years
We're fast-forwarding 25 years from our last freebie, moving in time from the Arts & Crafts movement in 1900 to Art Deco in 1925, with it love of geometry and color.

This paper pack uses artwork in a children's book published by The Volland Company in the 1925. The illustrations are by VE Elizabeth Cadie.

I wish I knew more about Ms. Cadie. There is almost nothing on the Web about her except exclamations over her lively Deco illustrations. It's unclear whether her name was Ve or whether this is a V. E. Elizabeth Cadie. The two motifs in these papers come from details. One is a colophon, the other a title page in The Cat Whose Whiskers Slipped by Ruth Campbell... and I cannot find anything about Mrs. Campbell.

Her stories are delightful.

Volland is well-represented on the net, primarily because it was the Joliet, Illinois (Chicago) publishing house for Jonny Gruelle and his Raggedy Ann and Andy series.
Art Deco
Ah - it's too complex. See the Wikipedia entry for Art Deco and the article about its birth place and time, the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Art Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes. The style partakes of all sorts of attributes: Art Nouveau, Cubism, Modernism, and plenty more.

Downloading and installing the SMB format
You can download it (5.4 MB) here. The file is an .SMB for Scrapbook Max and SBM automatically installs it.

To use the file, when your Web browser asks you what you want to do with the file, click the "Open" button (Internet Explorer or Opera browsers) or choose "Open with: Scrapbook MAX!" and click OK (Firefox browser). Once the file has downloaded, you should see a message that tells you that the template has been successfully installed. It will now be available the next time that you create a new project or page.
Don't have Scrapbook Max?
For those of you without Scrapbook Max: the file is really a ZIP file. You download it, change the file extension to .ZIP and use any ZIP utility to retrieve each of the JPEGs and PNGs. But you should get Scrapbook Max...
Styles
Foster + McKeehan types

clean lines
graphic
eclectic
hip & trendy
classic

Free Arts & Crafts Minikit for Scrapbook Max

2009-02-09T08:52:00.000-05:00

Download the 9.4 MB minikit here

IMPORTANT NOTE: these are all collected as Embellishments. This means that you will NOT find the kit if you start a New Scrapbook and try to find it from on the "Select a Theme" dialog.

Here's how you find them
You start a new scrapbook (or open an existing one), and once you it's open , you click on the heart icon or Object > Embellishment, and you will find the folder named DJGArtsCraftsMinikit.

It's the first of a planned set of products I'm calling the 1900 Series.

What's included in the SBM files
This mini-kit's based on some British, American and Canadian Arts & Crafts designs.

It includes:

2 papers based on wallpaper designs from architect Charles (C.F.A.) Voysey, clean and straight from the factory
2 duplicates, but grungey
1 ribbon, neatly pressed in Arts & Crafts / Art Deco style
1 ribbon duplicate in the form of an engraving
1 ribbon shadow PNG -- you can make the ribbon appear to float inches above the page!
1 enamel button that picks up the rose motif of one of the papers
1 wood, bronze and mother-of-pearl, Arts & Crafts style photo frame
4 photo corners (UL, UR, LL, LR) based on Arts & Crafts silver pin.

The 1900 Series
The 1900 Series will include decorative styles that were well in place in that year. More accurately, it includes styles floating in the air from the mid-1800s through 1920 (and which continued at least on through to Danish Modern in the 50s and 60s).

These include:

Art Nouveau / Jugendstil (France; Germany)
Arts & Crafts (England, Canada & US)
De Stijl (Netherlands)
Vienna Succession (Austria)
(later) Bauhaus, Art Deco, and more
(in the auction world) Late Victorian, Edwardian

It just so happens that these styles (and it's often hard to tell them apart, to be honest) are major favorites of mine... and of millions of other people.

About the Arts & Crafts Movement
Arts & Crafts began as a social movement in the mid-19th C. It sought to bring beauty to the common person. It contrasted well-designed hand-made goods, beautiful to the eye and beautiful in use, with cheap, kitschy machine-made stuff.

John Ruskin and others (including Arts & Crafts genius William Morris) felt that the designs embodied in mass-produced goods were aesthetically bad, and that bad aesthetics coarsened and demoralized daily life.

Arts and Crafts turned to nature and to Medieval English inspiration to avoid square corners -- angles other than 90 degrees were OK -- and decoration for decoration's sake. Everything was to flow from history or nature, and every detail was supposed to contribute a cohesive sense of beauty.

In painting, the approach was played out in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, symbolized by the willowy, yearning work of Edward Burne-Jones -- not coincidentally, a close friend and collaborator of William Morris.

In this kit, the abstract rose blossom in one of the papers is based on Medieval models (the Tudor Rose in particular, though the color scheme in the latter join the white rose of York with the red rose of Lancaster).

Note on the process
All the designs are based on originals. I produced them using vector art techniques in Real Draw Pro from Mediachance and Xara Xtreme from Xara Inc. I spend around 50 hours total in research before beginning.

The ribbon is a scan of an actual ribbon -- took about an hour to select the ribbon, iron it, scan it and extract it. The rose paper was done in less than two hours; the floral pattern took 10 hours and it's still not 100%. The button borrowed elements from an earlier pin and took about an hour only because I had done the earlier pin wrong. The frame took under an hour. The photo corners took many hours, far too long, and involved preliminary work in Asymetrix Web3D, a 3D modeling program.

Downloading and installing the SMB format
You can download it (9.4 MB) here . The file is an .SMB for Scrapbook Max and SBM automatically installs it.

To use the file, when your Web browser asks you what you want to do with the file, click the "Open" button (Internet Explorer or Opera browsers) or choose "Open with: Scrapbook MAX!" and click OK (Firefox browser). Once the file has downloaded, you should see a message that tells you that the template has been successfully installed. It will now be available the next time that you create a new project or page.

Don't have Scrapbook Max?
For those of you without Scrapbook Max: the file is really a ZIP file. You download it, change the file extension to .ZIP and use any ZIP utility to retrieve each of the JPEGs and PNGs. But you should get Scrapbook Max...

Styles
Foster + McKeehan types (see this post)

graphic
eclectic
hip & trendy
classic
shabby (Old World, romantic)

Freebie: I have a heart after all

2009-01-30T08:51:00.000-05:00

DJG_Valentine Frame... Suggested Serving (above)

A while ago, on the Scrapbook Max forums, I said I wouldn't be doing any Valentine-y kinds of things.

Then I ran across a neat card design and decided to 'improve' it... or at least take my own swipe at the idea - a frame around a cluster of hearts. It's in the Suggested Serving above, at the bottom right.

But with built-in extras
Then I decided I could pull out each of the hearts and the frame alone. These could then become embellishments... see above, upper left, and lower left.

Upper left is a photo of Kittie and me on our 45th Anniversary trip that included stops in Montana, Oregon, Washington state and Vancouver Island. This is us in front of Multnomah Falls, Columbia River Gap area, Oregon.

On the lower left, I've simply rotated the frame-plus-hearts and added a few more hearts, spilling them over into the background.

SMB format
You can download it (2.1 MB) here . The file is an .SMB for Scrapbook Max.

Now for those of you without Scrapbook Max: the file is really a ZIP file. You download it, change the file extension to .ZIP and use any ZIP utility to retrieve each of the PNGs.

Styles
Foster + McKeehan types (see this post)

eclectic
hip & trendy
anything goes

Style-ish book worth getting

2009-01-30T07:20:00.001-05:00

A long time ago (some time before 322 BC) Aristotle wrote his Poetics.

Wait! Wait! Don't stop reading, even though I'm delving into dead Greeks....

In Poetics, you see a fine, fine mind carefully noting the playwriting practices of his day. Aristotle categorizes the conventions of his day and makes some incredibly astute observations on how plot lines develop.

Since then, directly or indirectly, Poetics has helped millions understand works of fiction... all because a bright guy could make sense of a welter of contemporary practics.

It turns out that the Greek plays observed by Aristotle express the more or less universal need to pursue a pattern of living through experiences, thoughts and emotions to reach some sort of resolution or conclusion.

Same Same for Scrapbooks
On a smaller scale and around a much more circumscribed universe, Kitty Foster and Wendy McKeehan did a similarly fine job of categorization of the welter of scrapbook approaches and types that are floating around us.

Their book is Find Your Groove, A Guide to Discovering Your Scrapbook Style (ISBN-10: 1599630060; ISBN-13: 978-1599630069).

The book presents 7 basic styles:

clean lines
graphic
eclectic
classic
shabby or Old World
hip & trendy
anything goes.

There is an eighth, journalistic, which is more an approach than a visual style, and can partake of any of the previous graphic styles.

The whole tome is a veritable graphics arts and design course in miniature, and it's really helpful if (like me) you know what you like but you don't know where to begin assembling layouts.

You can get this book used (or even new) at very low prices, and you should. And that's even though there's a bit of confusion around the differences between classic and shabby/Old World.

I like it so much that I'm going to reference Foster + McKeehan styles in any scrapbook kits or embellishments I produce... the first a random collection of Valentines goodies that together fit several styles: eclectic, hip & trendy, and anything goes.

The collection should be my next post.

Scrapbooking... polymer clay...a blog at 66

2009-01-25T13:26:00.000-05:00

Here's where it all starts. First blog. At age 66.

And here's how I got here:

A while ago I (or, rather, we, Kittie and I) made a living with stoneware clay. With the effort, I bought a house, a car, then supported two kids.

We did OK, but burnout finally got me some time in 1979. Experimental glazes failed and I didn't have the trouble-shooting skills to determine what was going wrong. My standard glazes became boring.

I noticed more and more how hard it was to drag 50-and 80-lb bags of clay and minerals down into my basement shop. It was ever harder carrying 20- or 35- or 50-pound ware boards up the back stairs to my kiln. It became harder and harder to keep concentration during the 18 to 24 hours to fire the wares. You get the picture. I burned out.

From there it was freelance writing... a strange group it was, but then I'm strange, so it worked out, for a while... then corporate life, then magazine life (the most satisfying and engaging of my careers), then high-tech startup (back to strange), then advertising agency life (where I finally took a graduate degree, a veritable PhD, in strange workplaces), then... back to freelance writing.

Freelancing never boring

No, it wasn't anything you're likely to know about, unless you are deep into manufacturing, plastics production and formulation, and a few other arcane subjects. But it is never boring.

The need for graphics in magazine articles and brochures led me to acrete various graphics programs. I passed on the biggies (Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator) unless a client would cover the cost of the software and opted for 2nd tier offerings (Corel PhotoPaint) and free.

With a sort of background in design and handwork from clay, and a fair grasp of graphics program operation, I idly played around in off moments. But nothing really gelled.

After discovering polymer clay (a mere 70 years or so after its invention in the 1930s), I began playing with it. I thought I could just carry over my mineral clay experience, and still take advantage of the color and capabilities of polymer clay, but I've never progressed past the for-personal-use stage. Probably won't. Doesn't matter.

In which our blogger discovers scrapbooking

Then I discovered scrapbooking because my daughter Jennifer had done some outstanding books. She uses real paper and real objects and puts together real albums.

From there, I discovered digital scrapbooking... a perfect use for all the skills I developed dabbling in graphics software. No harm to trees. No big bucks for punches and tools and papers and embellishments.

Ways to assemble digital scrapbooks were all over my computers. Adobe InDesign, Serif PagePlus, Microsoft Publisher, Mediachance Real Draw Pro, even PowerPoint and Word. But they had drawbacks, one or another.

Then, in 2007, Scrapbook Max (http://www.scrapbookmax.com) somehow came into my purview, and I downloaded and tried it.

I'll have more to say about Max on other days. It does some very sophisticated stuff with minimal hassle.

Anyway, bottom line, here we are.

We'll be producing some embellishments, papers, shapes and kits over the next little while. There will be a store sooner rather than later (still deciding between etsy and eCrater).

History, grungy, nostalgic-romantic

I've decided on a style, more history than cute, more grunge than daylight, more nostalgic-romantic than edgy.

Watch for freebies

Freebies will be available through this blog -- and now and again on the Embellishments forum in the Scrapbook Max community site.

Anyway, welcome to my world.