A weeks worth of paint and canvas

Last week was good and bad, a double portrait commission I was working on failed, got one mug right and the second one.....well not quite on target. In this case I'm not sure what to do other than let it dry and move on.

In the meantime I wanted more practice on my flowers so I did another 20x20 floral. This time I wanted to work on another variety we have in our garden; a very full solid pink with vermillion center accents. However, very few came up last spring, so I'll use some older photo references from 2010. That year we had a bunker crop of several pinks including these in the painting below.

 #878 Pink Peonies 20x20 oil on linen (12-22-13)

It might be time to start painting some of these from life. With that in mind, I went online hoping to find a wholesale florist supply where I could buy cut stems. I found many good suppliers, however Peonies are seasonal and won't be available until March.....I'd prefer not to wait that long since it has my attention now plus I need new things to paint. Other flowers are available...even at the grocery store...generally not my cup of tea or something I would paint. But......

More flower research ahead! 

 JANUARY 2014 Ad - AMERICAN ART COLLECTOR

  Scanned image

#749 Yellow and Black Koi 72x66 oil on linen (11-13-12)

I learned a bit more about colour printing systems with my January AAC ad.  Its a takeoff of my 1/2 page vertical ad which I like a lot. This is a ad new layout for me which still needs more tweaking.  But, the biggest issue here was colour reproduction.

From past printing experience I knew some of my colour range couldn't be printed......in this case, my range of soft greyed purples and blues turned electric blue. Given all the ads and editorial AAC has done for me, this is the first time it became an issue. Its a JPEG/CMYK conversion issue; the magazine uses CMYK. They do see the difference between what you send them and what will print, but its not something they can easily do anything about.

The very first ad proof was off colour......after a lot of emails and proofs, I now know this is where the colour issues show up clearly at my end. The point is to change images, not do endless emails complaining about it.

We did make an image change on the last proof (no colour issue) but this ad was geared to a particular gallery. They didn't have the painting and we ran out of time.  I felt compelled to proceed with the original image.

Lesson learned: Better to stop, make an image change (hope it works) before you run out of time as we did here. A good ad is very much about a good strong image rather than any written message!

 SOLD!!

#855 Venetian Light 30x30 oil on linen (9-18-13)

 Congratulations to Richard Stravitz Fine Art Gallery in Virginia Beach!!

After #878 I made two more passes on my failed portrait commission and failed again! So be it....after repainting the one head 2 times, basically wasting another two days I figured it was time to start over or move on. 

Later....