Bottle Collection FINAL

"Bottle Collection"

oil on panel

18 x 24 inches

See previous blog posts about this painting here

I said to a friend recently, a long painting is like reading a good novel - you want to finish it but you're sad when you're done!

This painting took over 3 months, and it's my longest and largest still life yet. Posting photos of paintings online tends to make every piece seem to have the same scale, but this one is significantly larger than any I have done before.

I won't be able to make a movie of this one, but here's a little slide show of all the stages of drawing and underpaintings. You can also click here to see it larger.

Teaching

I've just finished teaching a 6-week drawing class to 5 students, we met once a week on Sundays for 4 hours. We worked from my statue of "Winged Victory" with pencil on paper and I introduced them to the concepts I have learned from my teachers over the last few years. We all had a great time! I thought I'd share my class handouts I gave them, and also the notes I wrote up for my private painting student.

Drawing: Sphere Demo

Drawing: Methods and Principles

Painting: Still Life Techniques

I'm hoping to teach more in the fall, if you are interested sign up for my mailing list by entering your email address in the right-side column to subscribe to my email announcements.

Oil Painters of America Juried Exhibition

My painting Silver Globe Pitcher has been accepted into this year's Oil Painters of America 2009 Western Regional Juried Exhibition!

The show will be held at Howard/Mandville Gallery in Kirkland, Washington, August 8 through August 30, 2009.

Plein Air in Utah

I just spent 5 days in Utah visiting my good friend and fellow painter Janell for a plein air painting trip in her hometown of Park City. The weather was unusually rainy/cloudy/windy for Utah in in June, but we managed to paint between raindrops.

Utah is just incredibly gorgeous and I spent most the 5 days with my mouth agape while admiring the dramatic displays of alternating mist and sunlight rolling off the mountains.

It was very, very cold. I actually had a single HAILSTONE land in my pochade box. Do I get some sort of plein air badge for that?

This pretty little streak of sunlight disappeared as soon as it was too late to change my painting, and only made intermittent appearances for the duration of the session. I spent the time between episodes of sunshine practicing painting the purple sage.

My amazing dad knit me these fingerless painting mittens from the softest green wool. From this angle you can't see, but they even have an intricate cable braid down he back of the hand. Far too nice to use for painting, but he insisted it's ok if I get paint on them.

It was all good practice to get ready for my upcoming month of outdoor painting in upstate NY.

Dust and Lint Solution: Wet Sanding

NOTE: This started as a brief addition at the bottom of the previous post, but then I ended up describing more details in an email to someone... then realized it's worth devoting a whole new post to wet sanding.

The issue is dust and lint that falls onto the painting or is deposited by linty brushes or rags. It doesn't seem so bad when the paint is wet, but the surface of the dry painting seems to show the impurities more as the paint film dries. 

I usually spend time at the beginning of a painting session blotting up any stray lint on the previous dry layers with a piece of semi-sticky tape, and then again at the end of the day using a tweezer in the still-wet layer, but I still end up with lots of debris. It might not matter for some painting styles, but for detailed glazing on a smooth panel it can be a big problem.

So I got a tip to try wet sanding and it worked really well for me. Here's what I did:

Materials:

• 1200-1500 grit wet/dry sandpaper
  
• linseed or other painting medium oil
  
• small bowl for the oil
  
• clean, lint-free rag of synthetic material - a microfiber eyeglasses cleaning cloth works great! (cotton rags and paper towels have too much lint)

I used 1500-grit "wet/dry" sandpaper, moistened with a bit of linseed oil. I rubbed any area of the surface that was imperfect: too much medium, or a piece of embedded fiber or dust. It worked really well, I was amazed how the imperfections were healed by the process - most debris lifted right out and left the colors of the painting intact. Small unintentional drips or ridges sanded right off easily. I had to do a bit of touch-up painting in a few areas, but the process was a huge success.

I did the wetsanding on fairly-dry areas - maybe a week of drying. Dry to the touch, but you could probably still gouge or dent the surface if you tried. I was also willing to repaint whatever I messed up. (I wouldn't try it for the very first time on a masterpiece you thought was done and no longer have reference for, in case a little repainting is necessary.)

I was actually surprised how much I could rub and disturb the surface, and still the colors of the paint would remain. In some places the surface fogged up a tiny bit but was pretty resilient. I did leave a very thin layer of oil to restore the gloss in some areas (although I know some people say not to do that and just wait till varnishing.)

Also, it's not sanding like you sand a piece of furniture - I used a tiny folded square of sandpaper bent over one fingertip and pressed very VERY gently and rubbed in a very small area, only in areas that needed it.

Once I sanded I had a yucky layer of wet oil and loose lint, so I needed to find a lint-free way to wipe that off. I found what worked best was a microfiber eyeglass-cleaning cloth I bought at the local hardware store. I could wipe firmly enough to wipe off the wet oil and dust, without leaving additional lint dust like a paper towel or cotton rag would have. 

Of course, a linseed-oil soaked rag is not good to leave around (serious fire hazard), so I washed it in natural turp and then soap and water at the end of the day... so it adds some steps to my normal cleanup.

One more tip: An accomplished painter I know just recommended using "shop cloths" as studio rags. They are extra heavy duty blue paper towels on a roll, I found them in the hardware store. They are amazingly lint-free. I had previously been using well-washed flour-sack dishcloths, and they seemed pretty lint-free but I now suspect they were adding to my dust problems - I seem to have a lot of very tiny white filaments flying around my studio. I'm going to try the shop cloth for a while for wiping brushes while I paint and see if that helps reduce the dust in the first place. (But I still would only use the microfiber eyeglass-cleaning cloth to actually wipe the surface of the painting.)

Let me know if you have any additional tips for cleaning the surface of your painting or dealing with dust in the studio.

Figure Study

figure study

graphite pencil on paper

cropped detail, 18 x 24 inch paper

This is a recent study of a 3-hour pose. This was the last session of my Tuesday figure drawing with Michael Markowitz's 23rd St Studio. The next series of classes starts up while I am away for the month of July doing landscape painting in upstate New York but I'm hoping to resume in August.

Update on the "Big Still Life" a.k.a Bottle Collection:
I got a great tip for dealing with dust that has already dried into earlier layers of my painting, and spent some time today wet-sanding the surface. It was deeply satisfying to get all the grit and imperfections out of the painting and now I have a surface like glass!

UPDATE Jun 5: I made a new post here about the wet sanding process.

Web Design Tips for Artists

I look at a lot of artists web sites, and a lot of them are unnecessarily difficult to navigate. I thought I'd write up the common design problems I find, based on the opinions I developed as a web and interface designer for 11 years.

If you are an artist and you want your artwork to be seen, make sure your site follows these guidelines:

Navigation

• Number One Rule: Keep it Simple
  Create one neat row of buttons down the side or across the top. Every page should show all the buttons to get to every other section of your site. The navigation buttons should never shuffle, move, or disappear.
  
  
• If you are not sure how to solve a navigation problem, look at other websites. Chances are someone else has solved the problem already, and there is probably even a standard way users are expecting to navigate. Don't re-invent the wheel.
  
  
• A button to get "Home", that says "Home" and nothing but "Home" should be on every page, in a logical place like the upper left or right corner.
  
  
• Your name is your logo. If it clicks, it should go back to your home page. It should not open my email program and begin to compose an email to you.
  

Gallery

• Make it as easy as possible for a visitor to see your artwork. The gallery should be no more than one click from the home page.
  
  
• Gallery should be a page of small thumbnails of each image. Do not make the thumbnails tiny square crops of the larger painting. The thumbnail should be the whole painting.
  
  
• If the user clicks a thumbnail, the painting should expand to a size big enough to comfortably see the painting. Between 500 and 1000 pixels on the long side.
  
  
• When the image is big, the user should be able to click "Next/Previous" buttons to see the rest of your paintings. Don't make the user go back to the Thumbnail page to see the next image.
  
  
• The "Next/Previous" buttons should be big enough to click easily, and should not move. Do not make your visitor reposition the mouse over and over to click the Next button.
  
  
• You can separate your artwork into different galleries or categories, but let the visitor scroll though ALL your images with the Next button.
  

Flash
Why sites made completely in Flash are a bad idea

• Search
  Search engines cannot read the text in an all-Flash website, so your site will not be catalogued and presented in search results as often and as well as it could be.
  
  
• Bookmarks
  The user can't bookmark individual pages to save paintings they like. Allow users to find you again!
  
  
• Back button
  Most users use the back button a lot while they navigate. Since an all-Flash site is embedded on one browser page, the back button takes the user not to the previous page within your site as they expect, but back to your entry page or completely out of your site to the previous site visited.
  
  
• Images are too small
  I don't know if it is a template that Flash site builders are following, but you all make your images too small, and don't allow the user to make them bigger. The "zoom" feature is annoying because the visitor is forced to peer at the image through a keyhole.
  
  
• Difficult to update
  Flash sites are the most stale sites out there. That's because they require a lot of work to update, a lot more work than a non-Flash site.

Miscellaneous Tips

• Frames=BAD
  For about 10 minutes in 1994 a software engineer somewhere must have thought frames could be a useful navigation tool. They were wrong. Don't Use Frames Ever.
  
  
• Web design is not print design
  Things that may look pretty in print, like tiny grey text and icons, simply do not work on a web page. Above all your site should be Clickable, Visable and Usable. Attractive is good, no one wants a goofy site, but you CAN make a clean and attractive site with buttons a user can easily click.
  
  
• Branding
  Your name is your brand and it should be on every page and in the title bar of the browser of every page. Even better, type your name in text (not a graphic) at least someplace on the page (even the copyright), so a visitor can copy and paste your name. Make it easy for visitors to see, remember and record your name.
  
  
• Location
  Say where you are! Don't share your address online of course, just include your city, state and country. Visitors to your website are coming from everywhere, orient them to your geographic location.
  
  
• Email launching
  Don't make your "Contact" button launch my email program and compose an email to you. The Contact button should go to a Contact page.
  
  
• Launching browsers
  Don't launch multiple browsers/tabs as the visitor clicks around your site, keep your site all within one window.

Final Word
Don't attempt to "be creative" with web site design. Your artwork should be what makes your site unique. Visitors who like your art will remember the art, not the decorations and cute buttons. Clean, professional, and organized are more important to communicate than "arty". Sometimes a few tasteful design elements work, but only if you are, or you hire, an experienced professional designer. Otherwise, just keep it simple.

UPDATE June 25: Lisa Gloria of Art Studio Secrets has published a great post about how to create a cheap, easy website that's a great solution for artists!