Day One!!!

     It's finally here! It was absolutely not my plan to procrastinate on my first day but I think the sun would have fallen right out of the sky if I had gotten started on a project on time. We don't want to disturb the natural order of things right out the gate.  So I got started at about 8pm which is fine because I actually needed the sun to go down before I really got to business today and that's only sort of an excuse.  See, my "studio" is not really ideal for art making, there's very little control over how much sunlight I get in here so if I'm doing something that requires dark, well, I have to wait till it gets dark!
     My first project is just your average portrait, with a little twist. No reason to get too fancy too soon, I need a few projects that will allow me to knock the rust off a bit.  The story behind this piece is that one of my most awesome cousins got married to her equally awesome new husband back in august.  My wife was invited to the bachelorette  party and was treated to some much needed gal time and when the big day came, the ceremony was gorgeous and the reception a blast (that side of the family is Irish Catholic so you KNOW it got more than a little rowdy) The tragic part is that my wife and I were moving that very week and didn't have money for a wedding gift.  Cousin Libby, being a class act, still sent us a thank you card for just attending.  I have planned ever since that I would make sure to get them something special when the time arrived that I had some dough to make that happen. The longer I waited, the cooler I felt like it needed to be and I have also been broke as a joke.  So, I have decided to paint their save the date card photo and give them a one of a kind original. This feels like just the right amount of unique and specialness. (disagreers can kindly eat one)

     

Here is the adorable photo in question:     

 
    Now the reason I needed it dark is that I am using an opaque projector to enlarge the photo.  I have a device known as an Art-o-graph and it takes the small photo and projects it up on your paper/canvas and you just trace what you need.  I know many of you might think this is cheating but I was trained as an illustrator, not a fine artist and we were taught that if there is a way to produce faster, better results then to hell with purism.  I could probably draw this out freehand and it might turn out nearly as accurate, but people buying art usually don't care if this was a labor of love and I took extra time to draw it all out. (and I can charge less for paintings that only took a fraction of the time so I'm sure any buyers would appreciate that!) I'm on a time table here and I want to get down to the painting part already.  The initial drawing is only a small part of the painting process, the viewer only really notices the background drawing if its wrong and if you start off with a weak drawing, well, its a little giving someone a jewel encrusted poo for their wedding, they might recognize that the jewel work is great, but a poo is still a poo.
      I mentioned earlier that there'd be a twist: Luke and Libby's invites and thank yous had these really elegant floral silhouette designs on them, there is probably an actual name for this design element and any design majors reading can feel free to let me know in the comment section but here is what that looked like:

     So my idea was to include these in the portrait.

This is what my "studio" looks like and on the left there you can just see the lens to the Art-O-Graph

Here's the actual tracing process, its not as easy as it sounds, your darn hand blocks the light pretty frequently and you have to do some amateur yoga to get it out of the way so you can find your line again - Man, my hairy sasquatch arm is really prominent in low light.

     When preparing for a painting this way, it's kinda nice to map out some of your gradient edges and blocks of light and shadow that wouldn't normally appear in a line drawing, just to offer that little bit more road map when you apply your paint.

I've highlighted the lines I'm talking about in red on this close up of the groom.  These aren't lines that separate two objects in space and he isn't one of those dudes who has a map of europe shaved into his dome. These are blocks of light and color in the photo that I'd like to get a vague shape of while I have the full size image in from of me 

The final drawing looks like this:

This is on Arches 400 lb rough watercolor paper (the last of my stash of this great paper from my college days) and it is bright white but I had a hard time adjusting the photo enough to get all the lines to show and not have it turn this manilla color, but it gives you the idea.

The next step is to mask off the parts I want to be white or want to preserve until after the initial paint is dry.  This is going to have to be tomorrow though because I may fall asleep on my keyboard any minute now. g'night.

To Do List of Art: The Final Countdown (This Blog 67.3% more intense if you blare the music of Europe while reading)

     So I've been digging in the catacombs of my art (a box I built for under my bed that when opened was 50% cat hair/50% art)  and I think I have a respectable to do list for the first portion of the Initiative.
     I have some things I still need to take care of before sitting down to paint.

Really big, important things. Trust me.

      So I am setting the official start date of The Paintmore Initiative as Monday April 9th, putting my completion date at June 27th (the day before my birthday? I absolutely did NOT plan that! I think its a good omen.) I'm writing this out as a schedule so that if there are certain projects that catch you're interest you'll know when to check it out.

 I'll be making art paintings from April 9th till June 27th

     (For those of you just skimming)
 
      The kind of bummer thing about documenting all the work is that some of the things on the list are going to be gifts to some of my friends and family and if they are nice enough to track my progress on here, it will ruin the surprise.  I'm choosing to believe that getting to see the process in depth will be a big enough treat (that's right, the privilege of reading my words is a treat, I hope you're savoring it) to offset the fact that they won't be surprised when they get their art gifts...Or at the very least serve as a warning that they're gonna have to be ready to fain gratitude for art they didn't ask for soon.

Don't be caught unawares like this couple who just opened their wedding portrait from me.

     I've tried to think about what my goals are and try to tailor the projects so that I get the most out of them.  I went over a little of this in the rules with my first post but here's a little more detail:

I'd love to capture this level of realism but glitter paint is only for the most highly skilled artisans.

      I want to loosen up and let the medium speak for itself a bit more.  That's the nice thing about hands on media verses the digital stuff I've done recently, if you can let go and not try to control every aspect of the work, you end up with a lot of happy accidents.  Especially with a medium like watercolor, the runs, the textures, the gradients, eventually you can get them to work with you and the result is...magical.
     I love to make people laugh and I'd like to find a way to interject that into the work and still be taken seriously as an artist.  This is a tough one since I'm essentially asking to have my cake and eat it too.  I may have to settle for playful or whimsical instead of full on funny since I can't think of anybody who would pay real art prices who want yuck-yuck jokes on their wall in their home.  I guess let me know if you disagree, maybe I'm describing my niche market and I'll be the first joke art bazillionaire. 
     That's the bulk of what I still have to learn before I'll be where I want to be as an artist.  I do want to work faster and have a better grasp of figure, clear the cloudiness between what I see in my mind and what comes out on paper, earn back the instincts I had in college of how wet the paper needs to be to get just the right draw of paint with watercolour and mix colors without having to think, draw with my whole arm without getting tired, etc. but these are all things that will happen along the way if I just do the work.

Enough stalling, here's the list of ideas so far.  Some are more fleshed out than others, some are just thoughts that I will have to build up as I begin to work. I know this contradicts what I just said in the last post but I think an outline might be better than an actual list.  I think its good to not have everything too planned, you don't want the art to stagnate in your mind before you even set brush to canvas.  Some of the work should be spontaneous and knee-jerk, that's part of the fun.  I'm being vague on purpose to keep you interested, its what they call a "tease" in the radio business, I bet you didn't know I was such a showman.

List of upcoming art projects:

4/9-4/11 - Wedding portrait in watercolour (just warming up)
4/12-4/14 - Closeup of parts from work in oil 
4/15-4/17 - UFO landing
4/18-4/20 -Your standard portrait
4/21-4/23 - Paper craft sunflower watercolour
Amendment Period ends (no turning back now!)
4/24-4/26 - Landscape - Pines shot from directly below the trees
4/27-4/29 - Grandma
4/30-5/2 - Spirit Tree
5/3-5/5 - Four panel Abstract that is arrangeable to create different looks 
5/6-5/7 - New Mama and child Portrait
5/8-5/10 - WWII Dog fight action
5/11-5/13 - Seudo-Cubist Jazz Combo with a pallet knife
5/14-5/16 - Coffee Collage
5/17-5/19 - Han Solo being a badass -watercolour and oil

Time for Some Tough Love

Thought I'd kick this entry off with some shots of some of my work since I'm sure many of you are here for the art more than the words and I haven't really started painting for the initiative yet.  This is one my forays into "serious art" I go here reluctantly but I know that not everybody wants jokey art hanging in their living room (God bless 'em if they do though!) and I really want to sell some work from this.  That's like, the definition of selling out, I know but I gots bills to pay yo. Anyway, there's got to be a middle ground where I can be true to myself and still have other people like it enough for their walls.  That's part of what I hoping to find.

My ArtPrize 2011 entry entitled "Famed Portals", parodies of Chagall's "I and the Village" and Matisse's "Dance"

The original is on top, mine is on the bottom. Had a little fun with the face of the leftmost dancer, since her face didn't show in the original I used the visage of another of Matisse's works "The Green Line"

The original is on the left. In my version the subjects of the painting show awareness of the viewer

The works opened away from the wall to reveal what the subjects in the painting see through the portal that is the painting

Got a LOT of my work giving me this look

     I've made declarations about getting into a real art regimen about a million times before.  Some of you closer to me may have heard about my six days/ six genre a week plan as recently as a few months ago.  I have a line of greeting cards that have needed tweaking for about a year now.  I have a comic book I've been in the script phase on for about seven years. (the most recent attempt got halfway through the storyboarding phase)  I have a web cartoon that I recorded dialog for and downgraded it to a newspaper comic of which I have only ever drawn two strips.  The details of these well thought out, but poorly executed plans and projects are unimportant.  The point is that since school I have done less and less artwork every year despite my intentions otherwise.  I'm hoping that this plan will work where the others failed and I think the key is pressure.
     It's not that I haven't finished any projects since graduating art school, but the ones that get done are the pieces that someone was counting on to be completed, either because they were paying or because I had some sort of obligation to complete them like as gifts for people whom I couldn't afford to buy for (or couldn't decide what else to get them) but that expectant pressure is what eventually gets my butt off the couch and a brush in my hand.

       So, for this current endeavor to work, I need anyone who reads this and has even a passing interest in my work to apply pressure to me.  I know it's a bit of an imposition and I'm not asking anyone to call me day and night and nag me about why aren't I painting.  Just leave a comment for me here, send me a facebook message or email.  To my friends and family who have my number, send me a text.  A small encouragement, a comment on what I post, just a casual "How's that painting thing you were gonna do goin'?"
     If I know that if there is even one person in the world that is counting on me to forge ahead with this, someone who I am letting down by not doing what I said I was gonna do here, then it'll be that much harder to treat this as business as usual and go play Skyrim instead.

Probably not the kind of tough love this guy doles out

      If saying nice or caring things isn't your thing then I give you permission to absolutely bust my chops on this, post me up, make me feel like crap if I don't keep it up, I'll deserve it if I fail after being complacent for so long.  I need any kind of help I can get on this and even negative attention is attention.
     The nice thing about having so many projects of different levels of completion is that I will have absolutely no problem coming up with 26 projects to work on. So there's a silver lining if ever I saw one. I don't want to start painting until I have a plan for at least half the works that I am going to complete so I am well under way before I start to get that aimless lost feeling of "whats next?" I'll have to dig through my old and half completed stuff and get back to you with my plan. I know it seems like I am stalling but I just really want to set myself up to win right out of the gate. I'm not starting the clock on the 79 days till I am all set to go.  Next post will include some of the projects I will be taking on.

The Rules: Gotta at Least Tie My Pants to Something if I Plan to Fly by the Seat of Them!

      I need to make art.  I need to do this so I can be me.  Not unlike Bruce Willis' character from Unbreakable (Hey, we take inspiration from wherever the universe offers it alright?) I feel sad when I'm not doing what I know I was put here to do. "So why haven't you been doing it then dummy?" you're asking, "Did you lose your hands at a Tazmanian Devil petting zoo or somethin'?" No, I absolutely have the ability to make art, I'll even go as far as to say that when I do, I'm pretty good at it.  It's just so easy now a days to NOT do things.  Wonderful distractions like TV, Movies, the internet and have you ever played Xbox? "Portal" alone would have caused the complete breakdown of modern society if everyone was as easily distracted as I am.  Between the world just getting in the way, having a "real" job and my fear of failure (If you don't put in a real effort, you can't fall on your face right?) I just don't make the time.  I'm not making excuses.  The only thing standing in my way is me.

    I've seen a lot of "Painting a Day" Blogs that have artists forcing themselves to create one painting per day but I have a few problems with this.  One is that while forcing me to generate SOMETHING having only one day will mean that the work isn't that thought out and I'll end up with a whole bunch of half-assed art attempts instead of a collection of my art that I'm proud to show. Secondly, I am looking to try something that, with a few tweaks, could be sustainable.  I think that after a long stretch of putting everything on hold to kick out a painting a day, I would have so much life stuff to catch up on, that it would be a long while before I could get back to painting at all.  

     One nice thing about essentially sitting on my thumbs for 10 years is that I've learned quite a bit about myself and how I need to work.  I need just the right amount of structure to keep this silly fear I have at bay.  I'm not one of these artists who love it when the whole world of possibilities is laid out in front of him.  The bright white of an empty canvas isn't my magic carpet to take me to a wondrous world of endless potential.  For me, it's a stifling end to a hallway and every stroke I add is a door in that hallway that shuts me away from what could have been, where this painting could have gone.  The anxiety of whether the path I'm traveling will take me to my intended destination or to a disappointment I wish I hadn't wasted time on is probably a big reason I have to be in just the right mood to pick up a brush.
    
     So let's look at

 

The PaintMore Initiative Rules

 

26 Canvases, 79 Days

    I've always said I do my best work under pressure so we'll see if thats actually true or if its just the only way I've ever known. See, in the past, I've applied pressure to myself by waiting until the last possible second to start working on a project.  Ask my wife about ArtPrize last year and my 4 day painting marathon before I hung still-wet canvases at the venue (actually, don't ask her about it, it would just put her in a sour mood again) why 26? One piece for every year I've been an artist.  79 days gives me 3 days for each piece and one day to spare.
     

 

The Only Mediums Allowed are Watercolour and Oil Paint

     The skill I've always wanted to improve is painting, so we'll say the only drawing I will be doing is in preparation for paintings. I was a whiz at watercolour in college so I'll make that one of my mediums so I'll have something familiar to fall back on when my confidence is wavering.  My weakness in painting is probably oil so that will be my other medium.  I'm not going to absolutely forbid the use of other mediums in combination with these two.  If I'm gonna get some awesome effects from adding chalk or airbrush acrylic on top of a watercolour, I'm gonna allow it.  That's the fun stuff, finding those killer combinations, but the primary painting needs to be watercolour or oil.

 

 

 

No Paint Brushes Smaller Than 1/4" Wide    

     I get way too meticulous with my painting I've always wanted to have a loose style like my hero Bill Sienkiewicz so I'm gonna pack up my quadruple zero brushes (the ones that are like, a single hair that modelers use to paint eyebrows on their tiny lead figurines?) and I'll limit my brush size to 1/4" wide and larger, that oughta loosen things up a bit.

 

 

 

 

Canvas Sizes, no smaller than: 13x13 for oil 11x11 for watercolour

     Canvas is just the word I'm using to describe the painting surface, they'll actually be Gesso'd Masonite for oil and various densities of watercolour paper.  13x13 is big enough to make some impressive wall art but small enough to not take forever to paint.  I originally had set sizes that I didn't want to deviate from just to give myself less to think about when starting these paintings, but I still want he freedom to make multi-canvas creations and with a set size that could get out of hand quickly.  I just want to make sure these don't get too small like some of the stuff Painting-a-day folks ended up making. 11x11 is just because I already have a bunch of 11x14 watercolour pads laying aroung that I can cut one side off of to make a square piece.  The paintings will probably rarely be these specific sizes(most likely end up a little bigger) but I wanted to affect some control here so I don't get too lazy and paint a bunch of postage stamps.

 

 

Only 4 Hours Actual Painting Time per Piece 

     I work REALLY slowly and I need to move with confidence and speed if I'm going to be an artist with the time I have to actually create.  My schedule is only gong to get more demanding as my wife and I start our family in the next few years so I need to learn how to speed it up now.  This also speaks to my meticulousness issue, less time to fuss over details will force me to loosen up and go with the flow.  The 3 days I have per painting will be spent developing the ideas, studying reference and preliminary sketches.  I usually breeze through this stuff so I get to the fun part but if I limit the time that my first squirt of paint goes on the palette till the final stroke on the canvas to only 4 hours I am going to have to spend the setup time wisely or end up with half done and just plain crumby work.

 

 

At Least One Blog Post per Painting

     This should probably go without saying but in order to keep this interesting for you and keep myself accountable, I'll need to keep a pretty good record of what's going on including photos, thoughts, roadblocks, successes, your standard blog fare, at least every three days.

 

 

Amendment Period (AKA: Escape Route from a Bad Idea)

     I am reasonably certain this plan is sound and will force me to do what I know I need to.  I am going to treat these rules as absolutely unbreakable but I need to offer myself a small parachute in case something is really not working.  I would rather make some amendments and salvage a portion of this project than spend the next 79 days so miserable I never even want to look at a paint brush on day 80 or end up with 26 rushed, half done works that look worse than my portrait of Skeletor from age 6.  So here is the deal.  These rules are more indelible than the law of gravity until I get 5 pieces done in this fashion.  On day 15 I reserve the right to tweak the rules for the ultimate success of the Initiative.  That's fair right? ...well who asked you anyway! Ooh, I'm gettin' cranky, must be time for bed.