Contours

The Red Room, Revisited

Shawn Falchetti — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 18:08:53 +0000

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:

In the Red Room

The Red Room, Revisited

One of the main differences between the two pieces is color intensity. In the earlier work, I used the red of the paper with some of the darker red and purple colors (terra cotta, black grape) and grayed lavender for the whites. In the newer piece, I used a fuller range of colors, with complements set side by side. For example, the reds contain: terra cotta, burnt ochre, parma violet, lime peel, mineral orange, poppy red, and dioxazine purple hue. Another difference is that last year I was working with Neocolors quiet a bit, and liked the soft edges you could achieve with them. For the contest, you could only use Prismacolor pencils, but I was still able to create some soft edges only using pencils. I tried to soften details in shadows, while tightly rendering items in bright light. A few detail shots:

As an aside, I’ll register the standard artist disclaimer that the scan is quite dark and doesn’t show all of the colors in the shadows. Maybe someday I’ll figure out the right scan settings to get a good reproduction!

Incidently, these are the last red room drawings because we deconstructed the red room earlier this year, painting the walls blue and installing a dark laminate floor as we converted it into a nursery. Maybe I’ll have a new series, “In the Blue Room”?

Merry Christmas 2011

Shawn Falchetti — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 21:27:17 +0000

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!

Baby on Board

Shawn Falchetti — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 23:50:45 +0000

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!

Happy Halloween 2011

Shawn Falchetti — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 21:58:30 +0000

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!

Getting Caught Up

Shawn Falchetti — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 01:46:53 +0000

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.

Getting my geek on, round 2

Shawn Falchetti — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 00:59:48 +0000

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.

So, this past Saturday when Kiersten announced that she saw a spark when disconnecting the magsafe powercord from her Macbook, I initially envisioned “static charge type flash”. It wasn’t until she replicated it in front of me that I realized it was “Fourth of July big finale!” type of flash, complete with burning smell. It looked like a bad special effect from a 50′s sci-fi movie, like one of those toy plastic ray guns that spews forth a shower of sparkles as you crank the handle. That’s not good. Using my awesome powers of deduction, I concluded, “Magsafe adapter….baaaaad.” Being very experienced at the replacement of magsafe adapters due to the voracious appetite of a certain orange furball who co-resides with us, we quickly logged onto Ebay and ordered our favorite discount version of it. Then I offered to share my power cord with Kiersten. She popped it onto her computer, and instantaneously we were greeted with Gzaaap…sparkle sparkle sparkle! and the smell of more things burning. We both stared for a second, then I said, “I’d like to revise my theory.”

A quick inspection showed the port itself was damaged, with two of the power connectors pulled out and partially melted. Some Googling showed Macbook innards, and that the part could be removed just by unplugging/unscrewing it (once you surgically removed everything around it), and, amazingly, could be bought for $29. The engineer in me excitedly rushed to dust off the precision screwdriver kit.

Naked Macbook

We're getting deep, now

The offending part/50's ray gun

And, in the end, it worked. There may have been an extra screw left after I put it all back together. But I’m sure it wasn’t to anything important.

CPSA 19th Annual Exhibition

Shawn Falchetti — Mon, 02 May 2011 22:37:39 +0000

“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.

This week I also received notification that “Daydreams” was juried into the 2010 Wilkes-Barre Fine Arts Fiesta, and won first place in its category, Graphics. The fiesta dates are May 19th – May 22nd.

Lizza’s

Shawn Falchetti — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 23:31:22 +0000

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. They own a Cruse CS285 ST scanner, which is larger than a pool table, and after scanning they work with me to meticulously color match every area of the print. When I first started working with them, it usually took three to four proofs until a perfect match, because the sandpaper texture of my paper combined with the high glare of the fixative created some interesting challenges. Now, they’ve become experts at scanning my work, and it will either be perfect on the first shot, or require only one markup. Once I frame the print, usually the only way I can tell it from the original is by tilting the drawing and looking for the 3d bumps of the sandpaper grit; otherwise, it fools even me!

Daydreams – Completed

Shawn Falchetti — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 23:07:12 +0000

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. I think the hardest part of the pattern was figuring out where to suggest it, and where to actually render it. I was worried that if it was too tightly rendered, you might end up looking at it instead of the figure. The other challenge was keeping the piece from turning too monochromatic. With the picture reduced on the webpage here, the sheet and shirt colors fuse in grays, but in reality they are layers or warms and cools. Next, I’ll take the piece to Lizza Studios to get it professionally scanned, and then size it as my entry for this year’s CPSA show.

Work in Progress – Feb 13

Shawn Falchetti — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 00:18:45 +0000

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!