Outdoor Draw & Paint Session at Como Park!

POP-UP ART CLASS

I will be at Como Park/Como Conservatory tomorrow, Saturday the 16th, at 9 a.m. until noon, to create some sketches and an oil painting on site. This will be mostly outdoors on the beautiful grounds; we may take sketch books and non-bulky materials indoors, but easels are not permitted inside the Conservatory itself.

Green Pond, 5 x 7" oil on canvas, ©Tracie L. Thompson 2016 (available)

Petunias at Como Park, ©Tracie L. Thompson 2011 (available)

The petunias in progress

Dancer Statue at Como Conservatory, ©Tracie L. Thompson 2010

This will be my first ever "Come as You Are" class opportunity. If you'd like to join me and learn how to choose a scene to draw or paint, how to create a thumbnail sketch before you begin, and have feedback throughout the process (as much or as little as you like), meet me near the Carousel at 9.

$20 for the class; bring your own favorite materials. Oils, acrylics, watercolors, dry media -- whatever you please. Hats and sunscreen highly recommended!

I'm Sorry, Wordpress, It's Not Working Out

Robert Street Bridge, 8 x 5" watercolor and pen ©Tracie L. Thompson 2016

I'm about to transfer over to a brand new website.

The one I've had for the past three or so years ... I just have to accept that I am never going to put in the hours of effort required to get it to work for me; that I am not up for the learning curve and don't retain what I do learn about using it. It's Wordpress based, which seems to be a great thing for a great many people.

I am not one of those people. Wordpress leaves the cap off my toothpaste, then drops it in the drain. It uses the last of the toilet paper and doesn't put a new roll on. For other people it's the sharpest dressed site in the room; for me, it shows up with shoes that don't match.

It'll get better, I keep telling myself. I'll learn how to communicate, I'll spend a romantic weekend resizing all my images. I'll figure out what I said to make it "lose" my Equine Art portfolio. We can work it out!

But the truth is, we won't. I have too many other things to get done.

Breaking up, as they say, is hard to do. I like the people I've been working with and dread having to tell them I'm out.

I'm heading for Fine Art Studio Online, which I've tested and found much more aligned with how I actually will use a website -- updating images is post-and-go just like this blog, which will also probably be moving in the next week or so, as I roll over to the blog function on FASO. The notion of being more centralized and less scattered is very, very enticing.

FASO let me link my Paypal account and put "purchase" buttons and a shopping cart on my site in, literally, about two minutes, without any third-party anything. If I'm not in love, I've at least got a massive crush. So I have come to the bridge, and I'm crossing it.

Birdhouses Continued: The Barn Owl House

The first birdhouse, the Screech Owl House, was so much fun to create (it was work, and a lot of work, but work I truly enjoyed) that I chose to make a second one. This has a tiny bird's nest inside just like the first one does.

My goal was to have it completed by April 22, when Saint Paul Art Crawl opened, and I made it!

Deadlines are perhaps the least fun but most useful tool in the Artist Productivity Kit. This is one of several brand new pieces I've completed ahead of Art Crawl, with most already posted to my Facebook page.

Make a Little Birdhouse in Your Soul

The birdhouse project, which has had me quietly singing Birdhouse in Your Soul for the past few days, began with a decorative basswood birdhouse from Ye Olde Crafte Shoppe. Saint Paul Art Collective gave a lot of birdhouses to a lot of artists and asked us to make art out of them. The finished works will be auctioned during Saint Paul Art Crawl from April 22 to 24.

The first thing I did with my birdhouse was give it some legs. Then I needed to figure out what kind of bird it belonged to. I liked the shape of an owl's head with the feather tufts on top, but a Great Horned seemed too big and too serious.

So I chose a little Screech Owl instead. They are an interesting combination of adorable and eerie; the eerie part is when you hear them in the middle of the night and HOLY CRAP WHAT WAS THAT.

A tight deadline meant I had to use acrylics instead of my default oil paints. This needed to dry, and it needed to dry FAST.

All the twigs are attached like pegs. I drilled holes in the base and the roof, just large enough to wedge the branches in and then glue them.

And on the inside, a tiny nest I found fallen to the ground some time ago. It was a perfect fit.

Spring Art Crawl is Coming Soon!

As usual, I'll be at J.A. Geiger Studio, and will be creating On the Spot Animal Portrait Sketches during the event. Start snapping shots of your favorite critter now!

Cardinals

These are details of a fairly large commission consisting of three wooden panels, each 24" square. I am having the worst time trying to photograph the entire thing; its subtle colors and the shifting sheen of the wood seem to confound my camera. I'll give it another shot this afternoon (if you'll pardon the pun), and meanwhile, here are the two birds I painted into the piece. 

Big Lemons and Such

Sometimes, big lemons are awesome. I grew this one on my balcony, from a tiny Meyer Lemon tree I named Lemony Snicket. 

Other times, the big lemons come in the form of, say, the MN DOT shutting down both directions of the interstate AND the light rail system, for the entire weekend of your carefully planned open studio event, so that instead of healthy traffic and steady sales, you do little better than covering your expenses. 

That's what happened to a great many artists of Saint Paul Art Crawl last weekend, myself included. It isn't the first time interstate closures have crippled the event, and surely it won't be the last. Things happen. Outdoor fairs get rain or tornadoes, websites crash, the cat horks on the rug and you find it with your foot in the morning. And sometimes, the DOT makes your event practically DOA. 

It was still a good weekend, and there's still no telling what good things might come of it. I met a few delightful new people and one amazingly cool Border Terrier whose portrait I drew, and we got a visit from a gallery director who drove almost an hour to the event because she wants to schedule me for an exhibit. And while things were slow because so few people could get to us, I finished a chicken for my upcoming Chickens of Distinction calendar for 2016.

Bogey, the Amazingly Cool Border Terrier

So that's the news from here, and it's good, and also if anyone has a recipe that requires maybe 1/4 cup of lemon juice ... I might need that.

Finding the Spark, Not Just the Bark

I spent much of Sunday creating very quick sketches of animals, using cell phone photos -- yes, still on the phone, on that tiny screen -- for reference. These are 8 x 10" and took an average of 25 minutes each. They all went home with their owners immediately, so I snapped shots of the art on my own cell phone when I had a moment.

If you're guessing that working from photos on a phone is challenging, you're right. It's especially so if you only have 20-ish minutes to capture what's important. 

For me, that means that more than anything else, I've got to get the expression in the eyes. I won't get the absolute accuracy I'd get if I had more time, but I've found that absolute accuracy is not what makes or breaks a piece of art. 

It's the life that has to be there, the sense of energy and character, and weirdly this is as true in a landscape as in a portrait of a Boston Terrier. 

I'll be doing these kinds of drawings again during Saint Paul Art Crawl. If you'd like one, come see me! But do bring prints of your favorite snapshots; prints on plain typing paper from your desktop printer are ideal. Working from a cell phone really is a lot harder. 

Princess Crow in Her Parlor

The Princess at Home in Her Parlor, two 6"x6" panels with collage, oil paint, colored pencil, wax medium.
CLICK TO ENLARGE if you please. She loses a lot of detail at blog-friendly size.

On Monday when I took the trash out, I found a small bit of spangled ribbon on the ground, and thought that it looked like a collar or necklace for one of my creatures. And here's the creature, finished last night, still drying on the still life table in my studio.

I had already taken these two wooden panels -- small ones, 6" square and 1.5" deep -- and used wax to collage some interestingly patterned tissue paper onto them. The pattern is very wallpaper-like, and very red. And then I had the drawings I'd already done of the young crow I once rescued from entrapment in a deep basement window well.

I flipped the drawing and copied it onto one of the panels, then picked up a black wax-lead pencil and began drawing twigs, a nest, a moon. Layers of translucent wax/paint gave everything color, and I allowed the "wallpaper" to peek through, because after all the sky is a living room for our young Princess. Some of the pattern served as remnants of foliage on the tree.

The necklace had to go on carefully, because if I covered it in paint by accident I'd never get that off. A thick layer of translucent wax, a few slippery adjustments, a few strokes of black to soften the edge, and STOP NOW YOU FOOL, IT'S DONE.

Still, I needed a moon: Something silver, with a subtle texture, easily collaged into place, shiny enough to complement the crow's necklace but not so attention-grabbing that it stole the show.

Nothing I had in the studio would do.

So I put my shoes on and went down to the street, in the dark, looking for a discarded gum wrapper in the litter. That's what the moon in this piece is made of.

Little Lulu

Lulu belongs to Jeanne Klein, organizer of the Horse Crazy Market where I exhibit in December. Jeanne takes a class with me, and brought in photos our friend D'Arcy Allison Teasley (of Horse Tribe studios) took of her animals; I chose a shot of Lulu to use for a demonstration.

The idea was to show how to draw/paint black shapes while keeping their form -- to make them dark enough to read as black, but not let them turn into flat black blobs. So all I meant to draw was that black ear and the area around her eye, and then ... it got away from me and the next thing I knew, I had this.

If you make art for very long, you start to get these odd moments of magic, where you do something and then aren't quite sure how you did it (or how you did it that fast). There ought to be a word for that, but I don't know it if there is.