BEST COMMISSION EVER!

This adorable baby, (who belongs to friends of my daughter), has to wear a little plastic helmet 23 hours a day to reshape his head. They brought it to me for a custom paint job. Lots of fun, and very very cute! He's not quite 6 months old. Apparently there are lots of babies wearing these little helmets.

I'M PAINTING ON AIR! (In air?)

I got am iPad Air for Christmas from Andy, which is very cool to start with. Then I got a case that has an elastic band to put your hand through, making it easy to hold up for a long time. Some of my "Painting with Pixels" students had brush styluses, (styli?) so I got one, and it's even more sensitive than a regular one, and much better to use for painting. Feels very natural. You can brace it against your side like a palette, and it's so light it feels like a little sketchbook.

I got a red case so I could find it quickly and easily in my generally cluttered studio, but it sure looks like an Etch-a-Sketch!

The NSO (National Symphony Orchestra) has been doing some dandy music events in our neighborhood, so we went to one last night featuring seven members of the symphony (without the white-tie attire) doing an eclectic mix of genres. The front man (Glenn Donnellan) was a violinist playing ...

an electric LOUISVILLE SLUGGER BASEBALL BAT!
Although he was bowing the instrument, he could make it sound like a fingered electric guitar or a bluegrass fiddle. We heard Led Zepellin, country fiddling, Chuck Barry, Jimi Hendrix, bluegrass, all superbly done. What a treat!

AAAAAaaand finally, the finished product!

A thing of beauty, and at least one small part of my life is organized. Can I count this as a resolution fulfilled?

The yellows are finished, finally. Whew, what a process!

Yellows are always problematic because at full saturation it is at a value nine, very high, and has nowhere to go in the value scale when white is added. Very top heavy. Messes up all the color charts.

On the left are some of the new pastels to add in. In the middle is part of the purple-to-red range.

In back are the grids for testing the colors. As long as I'm going to all this work I may as well make art , too. I've been obsessively making color grids since college.

This is the red-to-orange range, roughly sorted into values. You can see the little squares in the tray where they have to go. Looks like about three times as many pastel as there is space. Ugh.

Here is the pastel station in my studio. The natural light isn't great, so there is a full-spectrum clamp-on lamp above the easel. I like to have the  pastels selection right in front of the painting for finding the right color. The cabinet is a Stanton Cart from HomeDecorators.com. They no longer carry that particular configuration, although they have many others. It is only 14" deep, so I don't have to reach very far, (I'm short), which reduces shoulder strain. It's on wheels which occassionly comes in handy, although it is quite heavy full loaded. There is a little dust catcher tray that I made from foam-core under the drawing board.

Some Pastel Sets
Here are a few of the sets I've put together. The one on the far left is the one at the studio painting station. The one on the lower right is my smallest travel set. The trays are made with foam-core. You can see that they are all arranged with the same color configuration, so that no matter which set I'm using, I know where to go to find the color I need.

At this point I have far more pastels than I will ever use up. I still want to get more, of course, just to make sure I have the right color. It's like getting a brand new box of crayons.

A new business card based on a picture from the "Copper Dreams" series.

Much fussing with Photoshop.

Click here for more Copper Dreams

The first one, "Big Roll, One", is printed at 8 1/2" X 11", and the second, "Blue Streak", at an impressive 12" X 18". They're both from the Copper Dreams series. The final piece, "Beach Glass - Sunrise, Coral" is 12" x 16" is from the Beach Glass series, which has made only a few blog appearances so far. It is a HUGE series, so it's taking a very long time to process.

It's so gratifying to see how well the prints turned out at these sizes, especially the Beach Glass, which has a lot of subtleties that that tend not to come through as well at smaller sizes. It's also tricky to make the prints, because the images have always been seen on a bright screen as a light source - light and bright. As prints, they become a reflective surface - duller and darker. It's usually a long process, with many tweaks and trial proofs, to produce an acceptable print. I'll talk a lot more about the issues of producing prints in a future post.