ShadowsFall

I haven’t been on my bicycle in six days. I haven’t picked up my brush in four. This is slowly killing me.

It’s an awful cliche´ but you just don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. Not that I’ve lost anything, I but haven’t had time to focus on painting and the weather has been so poor that cycling is a dangerous activity.

I have been sorting through some of my artwork photos and have begun prepping them for print work. I have the RedBubble store going, yes, but that’s not likely to do much of anything at all. Instead, I’d like to start promoting myself locally and handle any real web sales through this (or some other) website. Here’s a preview…

What will eventually be an 18"x24" reproduction for sale.

A big problem I’m having is the amount of photoshop resizing and stretching I’m having to do in order to get the photos to maintain the correct proportions. In the end, they’re still not a 100% faithful representation of the work.

I’m well into my painting for June and truly digging oils. To paraphrase a line from the movie Hellraiser, “To think, I hesitated.” It’s going well enough and I’m mostly confident in my work now. The portrait is still not 100% accurate to the appearance of the individual in my source photo, but it’s fairly close.

I’m digging portraits enough that I bought an “old masters” guide for portrait work with a gift card I had laying around. Normally I’m not one for the “how-to” books, since I feel like I should know the important stuff. However, this book looks like it has some meat to it. We’ll see how it goes.

14"x18" Oil on Canvas Board. Work in Progress

While I’ve posted some work over on DeviantArt, and DeviantArt has a store component, I don’t expect much to come of anything in the way of sales. DeviantArt seems so casual. RedBubble at least feels more serious. So here’s the sales widget, which looks really… plain. I may alter it.

Last night, fellow artist Lydia Burris was kind enough to help me with getting some photographs of my artwork. She shoots her own work and makes it ready for print, so I knew I was in good hands. One of these days I’ll partition off this blog and render a traditional portfolio website like hers (and like I used to have).

Prior to the photo session, I spent some time at the Art Institute of Chicago for some inspiration. Even though I know that my work process is pretty sound, I always have to look to others to check myself – to make sure that I’m “doing it right”.

I am. And I need to remember that.

I’ve taken some time off of work, which gave me plenty of time to work on a new painting. I’ve taken on two new aspects of my work: a portrait and oils.

First of all, I’m a decent enough portrait artist when it comes to pencil or charcoal. Paint is a completely different story. I’ve never really attempted a painted portrait beyond a self-portrait some 20 years ago, so my ability to really translate someones likeness is very limited. And I’ve never worked in oils, because I’ve always been intimidated.

Overall, I’m happy with what I’ve done, even though it isn’t completely as realistic as I’d like. I think it’s a really good start with both disciplines. I’m still putting the finishing touches on the work. I will update as soon as I have a decent photo of the finished painting.