Contours

Prismacolor is hosting a contest on their Facebook page, where the grand prize winner may have his artwork appear on one of their 2012 tins. I decided to create a piece specifically for the contest.  A few years ago we did a makeover on a small room in our house, converting it to a den.  The walls were painted a rich terra cotta color, and one of the lamps was red stained glass.  I nicknamed it “The Red Room”, and did a piece called “In the Red Room” (12″H x 9″W Prismacolor pencil on red Artspectrum Colourfix paper, 2007).  Earlier this year I was thinking about some ideas for pieces and took a few photos for some poses, and one of these became “The Red Room, Revisited” (15″H x 10″W Prismacolor pencil on black Artspectrum Colourfix paper, December 2011).  Here’s a picture of both pieces side by side:

Read more »

Our Charlie Brown Christmas tree is getting ready to be filled with presents.  We have many favorite ornaments, including this little painter guy.  I’ll bet he’s hoping that giant stocking underneath him gets filled with art supplies!

For those who haven’t seen the Facebook posts, Kiersten and I are expecting a baby, due March 2012. We’ve been frequenting The Bump website, and I liked their countdown tickers and thought I’d post one on my website.  We’re a little more than halfway there!

This weekend Kiersten and I did our annual pumpkin carving, which felt a little out of place this year with 7″ of snow falling outside.  Happy Halloween!

The past weekend I decided my blog wasn’t getting much TLC.  It’s actually 5 years old this year, and has had tweaks and upgrades here and there, but on the most part it’s looked pretty much the same and hasn’t used all the latest bells and whistles of WordPress.  It started innocently enough: add some snazzy thumbnail previews to my posts.  This involved modifying code, which, like most of my WordPress tinkering, resulted in a subsequent run of days where visitors were greeted with “error!” and a white screen, instead of an art blog.  After much hair pulling, I discovered the offending piece of code was one single space (ah, computers are great that way).  Anyway, along the line I started thinking about how my blog is different than my Facebook page is different than my portfolio page.  I tend to use the blog a little more like a diary, with posts including everything from how the cat ate my latest computer cord to photos of the pumpkins we carved for Halloween.  It made me want to change the look of the blog, and I stumbled on this diary theme.  I’ll try it out for a while and see if it fits – kind of liking it at the moment.

A few months ago my trusty MacBook’s motherboard fizzled up in smoke.  I vividly recall staring in disbelief, poking at the keyboard with one finger, staring in disbelief again,  cursing the computer gods, pouting, going through the stages of denial, getting a repair quote,  scheming how not to pay the repair quote but instead fix it myself, stalking Ebay, cackling as I tried out all 24 bits of my new precision screwdriver kit, and, amazingly, actually repairing it.  All in all, a great experience.
Read more »

“Daydreams” has been accepted into the CPSA 19th Annual International Exhibition.  This year the exhibition will be hosted at the Charles W. Eisemann Center, 2351 Performance Drive, Richardson, Texas.  Show dates are June 29 – July 31, with the artist’s reception on July 16th.

Read more »

Today I finalized the proof of “Daydreams” at Lizza’s Studios.  I’ve been selling prints of some of my work for a while, and Lizza’s always does the scanning and giclee prints for me.  Additionally, I use their scans for my CPSA show submissions, since their professional scans look 1000% better than what I can accomplish with either a photo or pieced together scan on my home computer. Read more »

Today I completed “Daydreams”, 12″H x 26″ W on Aubergine Artspectrum Colourfix paper.  Pencils used were mostly Prismacolors, with also quite a few Derwent Coloursofts, and Neocolor IIs used sparingly for the black areas.  All of the crazy fabric folds weren’t the hard part – I love drawing fabric; it was the sheet pattern which gave me the most difficultly.  Read more »

Moving into the home stretch.  I need to refine the sheet pattern on the right, then start putting in the fine details, including the final darks and lights.  Maybe I’ll finish it next weekend!

Read more »

This weekend I turned a corner on the picture, and hit the point where everything is drawn and I can focus on pushing in color and building value.  The pattern on the pillow is still giving me trouble, but strangely the pattern in the sheets is coming together on its own.  I decided to hit the piece with a layer of fixative before continuing work early today, because it was getting pretty waxy and difficult to see how dark some areas were.  I’m always a little nervous about doing that too early, because the paper becomes slicker overall, but it seemed to work okay.  I also encountered the usual paradox where my darks didn’t seem dark enough, but in actuality I needed to make all of my lights lighter.

Read more »