Thing-a-week: Pet portraits

Like many artists, I'm a bit of an animal nut. My spouse and I share a home with a couple of feisty cats (as if there's any other kind) and a 65-lb Shepherd-X. It's hard to do anything without some sort of animal interference: the dog tap-dancing in the kitchen while I'm cooking, a cat pawing at my wet palette while I'm painting.

Portrait of Henry J. Sasano, 11x14, acrylic on canvas

But I've never tried painting my animal friends -- or anyone else's. So, this weekend, I decided to try my hand at pet portraiture, starting with the very personable Henry J. Sasano, a Boston Terrier who owns my good friend Mari Sasano (an Edmonton freelance writer).

It seemed easier to start with someone else's pup, rather than my own dog, who I see every day. I worked from a photo from Mari's Facebook page, and added a whimsical, wintery backdrop since Henry's a big fan of dog parks.

It's not a bad first try, I think, although I'd do it differently, next time. In hindsight, I should have picked a more active shot of Henry, to capture his fun-loving personality. In my portrait, he seems to be saying, 'Uh, now what?'

Photo of Henry, taken by Mari Sasano

After hitting up a great art sale at de Serres on Saturday, I had loads of fresh paint and canvas on hand and decided to do another portrait -- this time, of my Truman.

It is, perhaps, the cheesiest thing I've ever painted. However, Truman may also be the cheesiest dog you'll ever meet. He smiles with his whole face and generally, the tongue is lolling and the tail's a-wagging. In many photos, he looks a little nuts, actually. But don't be deceived -- he's a little nuts in real life, too! (It runs in the family).

Truman, looking a little nuts.

Photo inspiration #1

Photo inspiration #2

As always, check out Mike Kendrick's Thing-a-Week too! He creates excellent portraits of humans and dinosaurs. :)

Thing-a-week: Knowing when to stop

When I first set up my art site a couple years ago, I was positively giddy when people began leaving comments in the guest book. Until one morning, when I came across this:

your paintings look like over-worked acrylic, but you do have potential and an interesting perspective... My advice (NOT THAT ANYONE EVER ASKS!) is to stop sooner on each painting, they will have more light this way and will look more fresh.

My knee-jerk reaction was to roll my eyes and rant about his arrogance to my cats (who were surprisingly unsympathetic). The problem was...he wasn't wrong. Even in the photographs of my work, he could tell that I'd edited and re-edited my paintings, piling layer upon layer of thick acrylic paint on the surface of the canvas.

I've always been drawn to thick paint -- I love the feel of it -- but I realized that it was limiting me. It gets tougher and tougher to modify a painting with every layer of paint. I generally like to paint fairly tightly, and it's hard to get clean edges and tidy lines of colour when you're painting over layers of paint.

Since then, I've made it my mission to practice setting a piece aside early in the process, rather than pushing ahead in order to "finish" (but later make a gazillion changes). Now, I work on several at a time, and put try to put each piece aside after an hour or two, and move onto something else. Fresh eyes can make a huge difference (that's a life lesson, really).

It's tough for me to stop. I regularly see things I don't like and feel a strong need (compulsion, really) to make changes. But a painting isn't a piece of writing; it cannot be modified ad infinitum. The vibrancy of colour and my original intentions can get lost in the process of "editing."

Last week, I decided to start another triptych, on three 12 x 16" stretched canvases. I resisted the urge to finish it in a single sitting, but when I sat down to tinker with it a couple days later, I got lost in the piece and 45 minutes later, the piece was covered in flowers. My partner politely noticed that it was "busy" -- but that was probably an understatement.

Fortunately, I hadn't slathered on the paint and could go back to make changes without damaging the integrity of the work. After lightening the forefront and painting over many of the flowers, I had a fresher piece, with greater visual balance.

So, thank you, Mark from London, Ontario, for your critique. Not bad for unsolicited advice.

As always, check out Mike Kendrick's Thing-a-Week at his blog, Ironcladfolly.com.  This week, he offers a quirky rendering of Paul Bunyan a Facebook friend, and another dino wearing sunglasses and a cheesy smile. You ride that productivity train, Mike!

Cat vs. Easel vs. Artist

Although hardly a year old, my easel looks as if it was rescued from an elementary art room. It's covered in paint, sure, but it's also held together with green painter's tape. It's been this way since a month after I bought it, when a certain tuxedo cat tried to climb it and it came crashing down on the hardwood floor.

Well, I presume that's what happened. I found it later that day in a heap, with one of the adjustable wooden slider-thingies in two pieces. This is a 6-ft tall easel, and not inexpensive, so I've kept it, partly out of pride (can't let the cat win!) and partly thinking I'd actually fix it (yeah, right).

The culprit.

But chances are good that my attempt to fix it would be in vain, anyway. The cat's taken to rubbing against the easel's legs (especially that dodgy third leg) and bumping canvases onto the floor. It's a bad scene. He's seriously cruising for a bruising.

But here's the good news: I'm still managing to paint quite large pieces, in spite of my precarious studio set-up. I finished a new painting today, in fact! It's 4-ft wide and about 2.5-ft tall.

I'm still not sure what to title it -- any suggestions?

Thing-a-week: Tastefully nekkid

No, not me -- the model at the lifedrawing class at Harcourt House!

Sure, I've drawn my shoes in art class, and sketched trees outside, but my life-drawing experience is really quite pitiful. To develop my drawing skills and better understand human anatomy, I've decided to start going to life-drawing sessions in town.

On Thursday, I went to my first session ever-ever, at Harcourt House (a neato art co-op) with sketcher extraordinaire Mike Kendrick! Armed with a too-tiny pad of newsprint and various writing utensils, I drew until I could draw no more.

Three hours, with two five-minute breaks (why didn't I bring snacks?), and strangely, I fatigued well before the model. I'm pretty sure she could've kept going, even though she held some pretty dynamic postures for increments of 30-seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes and 5 minutes.

The sketches below represent a range of time frames, although it's pretty obvious that the better ones came from the longer periods.

Wow, was it ever tough. It's actually really hard to 
presented, rather than extrapolating other angles that your mind is aware of, but your eyes can't technically perceive. And the relationships between parts of the body can be really tough to master. I think I make thighs and forearms much longer than they actually are. Time to re-train my brain!

As always, don't miss Mike's Thing-a-Week! His griffin is just lovely, although his sketches from the life-drawing class were more than blog-worthy!

If you didn't check out his neato dinosaurs from last week, make sure to do that, too. You may even get a chance to see them in the flesh at July's Whyte Ave Art Walk (that is, if they don't sell first!).

Thing-a-week: Sleepy Sunday edition

Ah, March. It's in like a lion and out like a lamb (hopefully). Winter's final hurrah. While we have yet to see any sign of spring, this week I thought a lot about my summer plans, including several writing conferences I hope to check out and Whyte Avenue Art Walk in July. This time around, I'll be exhibiting at McIntyre Park with members of Night of Artists. As a result, I was lucky to dodge registration day on Saturday, which often means hours spent in line (as my blog buddy Mike Kendrick can attest to, unfortunately). However, it's well worth it. As art events go, the exposure's amazing, the fees are reasonable, and it's a helluva lot of fun to paint outside in the sunshine!

Anyway! This week's Thing-a-Week isn't a painting -- it's a digital illustration I completed for the Ubyssey (UBC's student newspaper). The story it accompanies is about scholarship funding.

I'm slowly getting the hang of drawing entirely in Photoshop. It's a lot of fun, but challenging with my tiny 4x6 Wacom Graphire tablet. I'm really hoping to invest in a large Intuos 4 in the near future...it's a thing of beauty, truly.

Make sure to check out Mike Kendrick's Thing-a-Week too! This week, he cracked out the acrylics, rendering a frighteningly rad T-Rex. I'm looking forward to the next in the series...crossing my fingers for a tricerotops in high-tops!    

Coming to a billboard near you!

So, it's official: I snagged a spot in the Artuponrequest.ca competition! Very exciting. I was one of three winners, including my friend Karen Bishop, an Edmonton watercolorist and new gallery owner (www.karenbishop.ca).

In coming weeks, my painting ("Bubbles") will appear on billboards across Alberta. So, many thousands of people will see my work!

As an emerging artist, this is a pretty big deal -- this kind of exposure is tough to find. Naturally, I can't expect everyone will like my work, but I'm hoping my image will offer a few stressed out motorists and pedestrians a moment of peace. Or, at the very least, provide some colour on dreary, winter-weary Alberta streets. March can be a really ugly month in
Alberta, thanks to the accumulation of sand and gravel on city streets, gray skies and blustery snow-filled days. And, unlike the start of winter -- when new snow has a certain amount of novelty -- we're damn sick of the white stuff by the time March rolls around.

So, a little art scattered in public places makes a lot of sense to me!

I'll post pics of the billboards when they're up. I expect it'll be pretty surreal when it happens.


Thanks again for all of your support...you made this happen!

Thing-a-week: Chocolate edition

What's on my easel today: a large (2.5 ft tall and 4-ft wide), acrylic painting. Unfinished.

Like so many North Americans, I'm a pretty terrible sugar junkie. My sweet treat of choice? Chocolate. Chocolate chips, chocolate cookies, chocolate-themed coffee drinks...the list is long. So, for the month of March, I've decided to ditch this vice in an attempt to reduce my disturbing dependency on chocolate and reduce my sugar intake in general.

I've always known I had a bit of a chocolate problem, but I think the reality of the situation hit me over Christmas. My sister, visiting from Victoria, commented on my stash of chocolate in my desk drawer. It seemed odd to her, that someone who worked at home would also have a secret candy stash in her home office.

Well, Ceara, I see your point. Hence this chocolate-free month! It's something like Lent, but without the religious motivation. This is entirely a self-centred endeavour. Especially since I'm bound to be more than a little grumpy for the first little while.

We'll see how the art practice is affected. I may ditch my 'bubbles' series for paintings of cupcakes and chocolate cakes. Mmmmm....cake...

A quick recap of my week: Lots of painting. My thing-a-week is the large, unfinished piece above. It's coming together rather slowly, but surely. My colleague, Mike Kendrick, spent a day at the museum drawing neat stuff for his thing-a-week, which you can view here. I like his style. I need to do more sketching myself, and hope to attend some figure drawing classes soon.

Weirdly, I think I'm most excited about some admin stuff I did this week, namely setting up an account at Image Kind. Now, it'll be possible for people to purchase prints of my works online, without having to go through me. The company even provides framing, which is a neat option if you don't feel like fussing with this yourself.

There are several high-quality paper options and I've ordered a sample kit to see them myself, so I can recommend the best options to interested buyers.

I'm also in the process of sorting out my Etsy storefront, newsletter, and new websites. Both my writing site (inkslingermedia.com) and art site (crawshawcreative.com) will be getting a facelift in the next couple of months. I'm thrilled that my art site will include 'buy now' buttons on all of my pieces, allowing people to easily purchase artwork without the hassle of contacting me.

As for the Artuponrequest.ca contest, I find out if I've earned a spot on Alberta billboards tomorrow. So, I'll let you all know the verdict, either way. I'll be crossing my fingers and toes for the rest of today...thanks again to everyone who left a comment and asked their pals to do the same!