Work in progress: Sachiko

I make most of my color choices unconsciously. Or do I mean subconsciously? It's not like I'm unconscious when I make them... Anyway, I'm amused to notice that the color scheme of the painting is very similar to the colors I used in the preparatory sketches. I guess Sachi is destined to have purple hair. Who am I to fight it?

Studio, rearranged

I am lucky to have a wonderful room to use as a studio. In honor of the Creative Every Day August theme, MOVE, today I rearranged to give myself more working space for art. The large table in the photo used to be my computer table, and I was using a much smaller table for art stuff. I'm very excited about my big new work space. I can't wait to get going on some new projects.

Now if only I could figure out a good solution for storing all these canvases...

Sachiko sketches

This week I'm doing some preliminary sketches for a portrait of a friend.

Still here, still playing

When life gets busy and I step away from my artwork for a while, sometimes I have a hard time jumping back in. That's when I decide to set the bar really low, and just tell myself to play around in my sketchbook. A good example of this is the above mess. My inspiration was the ticket stub from Museum Brandhorst (pasted in the upper right corner). By incorporating scraps of paper I collect as I go about my day, my sketchbook becomes a little like a visual journal of my life.

Now back to catching up on the 100 in 100, again.

Self (portrait)

Inspired by this month's Creative Every Day theme, self, I decided to start a new self portrait today. Can you tell what kind of mood I'm in?

I've done tons of self portraits, my whole life long. I like making portraits, and I'm always the most available subject. I'm doing this one (like most of my self portraits) by looking in a mirror. I like working from life when I get the chance.

I actually try to curtail the number of self portrait paintings I do, because they are pretty unsellable (and ungiftable). Not that I only do art to be able to sell it, but I have to sell things in order to have room to produce more. And who wants to live in an apartment full of self portraits? That'd be a little creepy. So would giving people portraits of myself as gifts... so yeah, I try to focus on other things. But I'm enjoying this chance to revisit my oldest subject.

Revisiting the Volksbad

I keep coming back to this tiny painting, trying to rework it into something I can be happy with. The colors have become brighter since the last time I posted it. Not quite where I want it to be yet, but moving in the right direction.

Catching up on the 100 in 100

I signed up for Warrior Girl's 100 in 100 challenge a few days late, so I've been behind from the start (which was supposedly June 1st). No problem, since I don't mind doing more than one drawing/painting/collage per day to catch up. Most of my 100 things will be small sketchbook pages, but I'm also counting the larger works I do when I happen to finish one.

As opposed to Art Every Day Month, when I posted daily, I've decided I don't have to post all 100 creations for this challenge. That leaves me freer to experiment and produce some totally crappy stuff. I like it that way. But I will post some of them. Here are a few of the drawings, paintings, and collages I have created over the past month. I'm proud to say that as of today, I'm all caught up on my 100 in 100.

To join or not to join

Since visiting Munich's new Brandhorst Museum this weekend, I've been trying to justify buying myself a membership to the Munich art museums. For €90 you get a year pass to several of Munich's best art museums (plus a couple in surrounding towns, as well).

Without the pass, I am unlikely to spend €90 on admission to these museums in the next year. But with it, I will be incentivized to go to them more often, in order to make sure I get my money's worth. And wouldn't it be great to have an excuse to go to the museum more often?

Do you have a museum membership? If so, tell me how wonderful it is to help me justify this purchase...

New series: city collages

Dublin, Ireland, 24 x 18 cm, found paper and acrylic on panel.


Tampere, Finland, 24 x 18 cm, found paper and acrylic on panel.

I really enjoyed making these, and I'm pleased with the initial results (I'll do a little more work on the Tampere one, at least). The collage elements consist of paper (maps, fliers) from the cities themselves that I've collected on my travels. I need to buy more panels so I can continue the series.

I think this one is finally finished (although this photo of it is somewhat out of focus):

Piran, Slovenia, 40 x 30 cm, mixed media on panel.

Would you let Google use your art for free?

My husband brought this article to my attention today, about how Google has been asking artists to create skins for them for free. The reward to the artist, naturally, is "exposure", that insipid internet currency.

I am familiar with this sort of scenario, not with my art work, but rather with travel writing. Ever since I started my other blog several years ago, I have been asked to provide my writing to various websites in exchange for "exposure" more times than I can count. My reactions to these requests have ranged from cheerful acceptance to indignant refusal. These days I usually just ignore them entirely.

So why the varied reactions? I've found it hard to come up with a blanket policy to determine how I handle such requests. Whether or not it is in my best interest to provide my writing for free depends on several factors. For example:

• Is it for a cause I believe in? By submitting my work for free, am I helping a really cool website grow? Am I helping to promote someone or something I care about?

• How much "exposure" are we talking about? Will it actually direct traffic to my website or lead to paying gigs for me? Sites that ask you to write for free often exaggerate the number of readers they get or expect, and these days most of them doing the asking actually get less traffic than I do.

• What else is in it for me? Will it give me practice writing in a new style? Will it help me explore a new topic that interests me?

• Who will be earning money from my efforts? Am I OK with that?

Now, back to the art/Google scenario at hand. Would I jump on such an opportunity? Probably, given where I am in my art career right now. Perhaps it would leave a bad taste in my mouth that a large, profitable company was asking me to work for free, but in the end I would probably stand to gain from the scenario overall. But Google is not asking me; it is asking much more well-established artists. Artists who are well-known in their fields, who already have loads of exposure for their work. For them, Google exposure would not necessarily be a benefit. In fact, as the article mentioned, artists agreeing to work for free for a giant, profitable company such as Google could set a "dangerous precedent", one that would harm artists overall. It makes perfect sense to me that so many are turning Google down.

If Google asked you to provide artwork to them for free, would you do it?

Inspired by Kandinsky

Played around with gouache today.

Back from a travel break

My in-progress Slovenian collage, last seen here.

I've been on the road for most of the past month and a half, which is why this blog has become neglected once again. I've missed having time in my studio, but at least I have been staying creative. Every day while traveling I write and take copious photographs. I've also been keeping up with my other blog, posting travel reports and photos.

To jump start my return to drawing and painting, I've just signed up for Rowena's 100 in 100 challenge. I'm a few days behind, but I'll catch up. First I'm trying to work out exactly what these 100 things will be. Sketchbook pages, perhaps. I'd love to say paintings or collages, but that's not very realistic (most pieces take me a week to a month to complete). Or perhaps it can be anything visual, as long as I post here about it. That would be a whole lot of blogging... I'll sleep on it and let you know what I decide (and by "you" I mean the one person who still reads this blog).

A Slovenian mess

I love the beginning stages of a collage, when everything is so chaotic, various materials slapped together in disharmony. At least that's how mine usually start out.

This collage-in-progress is inspired by my recent trip to Slovenia. The background consists of pages from an old Slovenian book my friend and I bought for a euro (it's about flowers). The foreground is layers of charcoal, conte crayon, and gouache. The imagery is inspired by various photos from the trip, mainly those taken on the coast.

Like I said, I love beginning a collage. The process is infinitely enjoyable. It's making it into a finished work that I've yet to master.

I'll let you know if anything comes of this one.

Photography: on the lake at dusk

One of the things I am loving about my new SLR camera is discovering its capabilities in low-light situations. Photos that would have looked dark and uninteresting on the point-and-shoot come out beautifully with the DSLR.



I'm still kind of stabbing around in the dark when I play with the settings, but I'm getting a little better at it. I'd still like to take a photography course, but my first attempt at finding a suitable one resulted in me being a little distracted by the sexist nature of the offerings. Perhaps it's time to try again.

Work in progress (and a new computer)

I'm back! My new Mac arrived a few days ago, and I have been busy catching up on the internet, transferring files, and generally learning my way around my new computer. The transition from Windows hasn't been hard at all, especially since my Windows machine was a total whiny uncooperative bitch these past few months. Yay Mac!

Now that I'm back and wired, one of my goals is to come up with a regular schedule for posting on this long-neglected blog. Hopefully that will be up and running by next week. In the meantime, here's the painting I'm currently working on, a Venice scene in acrylics. I'm happy with it so far, although I still don't know what it's going to look like in the end. Looking forward to finding out.

Painting: Munich's Volksbad

30 x 30cm, acrylic on canvas

Last seen in this post, my Volksbad painting has been sitting stagnant for quite a while. I did a little more to it this week. I still think it's pretty... boring. It's not the kind of painting I want to produce. Can't decide if it's worth any more work or not. Back in the wait-and-see pile it goes...

Two more

I know these aren't the most brilliant things I've ever created, but they're a whole lot of fun. This second one is a re-working of the middle painting from my last post. It just didn't have enough personality before.



Now all ten little canvases are full, and I'm going to have to come up with something else to work on. I started a new cityscape today, plus I stretched another piece of watercolor paper so I can give gouache another go.

I'm also hoping to do something with this month's Creative Every Day theme, which is dreams. I had the most visually stunning dream the other night, but I don't think I could begin to do it justice if I tried to capture it. But maybe it's worth a try.

more little face paintings

I'm not sure all of them are done, but if I waited until I was 100% satisfied with things before posting them here, I'd never make any posts at all. These are all 15 x 15 cm canvases, acrylic paint.

Lessons in gouache

I've put off posting this, my first work with gouache, for what should be obvious reasons now that you've seen it. In an effort to make the edge of the buildings a little crisper, I decided to employ some masking tape. You know, as a mask. It seemed like a good idea at the time, until I went to remove the tape, taking big chunks of the paper with it.

So now what? Rather than just tossing the entire painting out, I'm trying to come up with a way of using it. Perhaps I'll collage over it, or rip it up and use the pieces in a different collage. There are elements of this painting I like, and I want to find a way to salvage them. I just haven't figured out how yet.

Tuscany paintings: good and bad

I think this painting (last seen here) is done, and I'm quite happy with the way it came out. I need to take a better photo of it, and then I think it's ready to go up on my art website.



This one I'm less happy with. Back in December I was almost ready to declare it done, but then I decided it was all wrong. I liked it a lot in its early days, but that like faded as I added in more detail and more colors. I recently changed the sky from pink to black, which was an improvement, but it's still not right. I think it needs some radical re-working, which I'm almost ready to do. Sometimes it's hard to accept that a painting needs a lot of changing when I thought it was so close to done. Time usually helps me get over that.