The Foreground.

I’m hesitant. A lot can and will go wrong with the foreground, primarily when it comes to the color and texture of the mountains and hill. I don’t and am unable to get the original model mountains here to make sure everything is right…and it scares me. I’ve got photographs of it, thanks to the gentleman who hired me to paint this…lighting can change so much between one place and another. So…again…I’m hesitant, but will push forward.

And it only goes to show the lack of confidence I have in myself. And in reading my sister’s blog, I can see there are times she feels the same way concerning everyday trials…raising a family for the most part. And yet, she has the awe inspiring ability to stand up in front of a large group of people to sing her heart out…something I can only manage to do as long as I’m hiding amongst a choir of other people. I’m deathly afraid of being singled out, the center of attention in front of a large audience. I remember peeing my pants on stage when I played a wizard in the Beauty and the Beast production for a small kids theater group we had; not to mention I had a hard time remembering my lines. From that point on, I’ve been convinced that I am incapable of memorizing anything. How I managed through a student written play during my senior year in high school is beyond me. I still don’t know how I agreed to perform it on stage, I would have been happier with a rinky-dink video recording of it.




But yes…I lack confidence in myself. The foreground terrifies me, and I’m scared to move forward. And there are other times I’m so confident in myself…I can’t figure out how to get back there. I suppose there’s just no forcing it on yourself…is there?

Experimenting is an important factor as well. Any good artist must be willing to experiment with their materials. Me…this is the second time I’ve used the aqua oil set I bought myself earlier to help explain to customers what it’s like. So much for that…I can honestly say it’s got the same consistency and feel for regular oils, but mixes well with watercolors and doesn’t require any of the solvents and mediums used to lengthen or hasten the drying process, nor to thin out the paint or clean your brushes. All you need is water. It’s refreshing in comparison to the company’s acryla-gauge, which is basically their solution to making acrylic paint less shiny/plasticy when it dries. Which is all fine and dandy until you realize that the glob of paint on your palette doesn’t remoisten after it has dried…SO not fun and a major waste of paint when you don’t know this.






I finally opted to go with a textured look…blending of colors to give it the right feel for the scheme, but not in any way attempting to try and match up the rockwork that will seem more detailed in the actual mountain model. Without the actual model here to compare and line up it’s the best I believe I can do. Besides, I would want more focus on the model layout itself than on the background, considering that’s the major work that got put into it by the man that built it! I even boldly went as far as to add whisks of grey into the background mountains…which I might add…helps to unify them with the foreground mountains.





But do you want to know what he said when I sent him these last couple of images above, to show him how I was doing…?

"The panels look wonderful. I wouldn't change a thing. I'm very pleased."

Commence ear splitting squealing!

Adding Grass…and Happy Trees!

I’m using too much water…which can’t be helped as my gauge and watercolor paints are all dried up and need water in order to loosen the pigment up again. And I seem to be having a problem in getting the shades and highlights right. It all just looks…muddy. I don’t like it looking muddy. It makes me think of my classmate’s project, back in my Painting for Illustrators class. He decided to do a collage of character faces from the Star Trek Series. I think mostly from the Next Generation more so than the rest of the shows. And his faces, especially the ones for the Klingons were…muddy. Ugh! There was no definition of high lights and shades in their faces…they looked bland and flat…and I’m afraid my plains are going to look the same way!

And using too much water isn’t helping any at all, because it makes it all look shiny before it dries, which means I have to wait until it dries up a bit before I can see how muddy it’s turned out. I know…a sign of impatience, and I’m sure there’s a lesson of patience to be learned here…which only makes me grumble and piss and moan to myself and random people who might happen to be online while I’m working on this. Breathe in…breathe out. All. Will. Be. Well.

If anything, I had to remind myself how to go back to dry brushing. It’s not all that hard to go back into, and I think that’s what I was trying to do before hand. Dry brushing is a very good way of making the grassy texture I was going for. However…it is a horrible waste of paint. If though you end up using small dabs of it, over a large amount of space…you end up using more and more and more and more…which can be very expensive if you’re not careful. So…for the most part, I’m trying to be careful, so I don’t wind up using more paint than I intended to. I think I’ll be mixing my base green up another five times before this project is through, though.

The more I look at this in comparison to the pictures of the original layout, the more I’m not liking how the mountains are turning out. They’re too brown…and not grey enough. I might just end up adding more white…more snow to them, as was seen in the original image I was using as a reference for them. References are key to making a good…plausible landscape setting. As it would with a cityscape and ocean view as well. It just…looks more real, more believable. I should definitely be fixing the mountains before I add in the trees.








And adding more snow doesn’t seem to be satisfying my dislike for the mountains. I had this problem when working on my dad’s submarine painting. I couldn’t get over something I didn’t like, that I thought wasn’t working out…and eventually gave up on fixing it only to find that…well…when you step back, it made the painting come together. So I’m putting my dislike for the mountains aside, and heading forth into painting the trees. Paint the trees, Cere…and you’ll see that it will turn out better. Trust yourself in this.

Heh…guess it only goes to show that I don’t have much trust in myself, huh? I should. I really should. I’ve got several other people, family and friends telling me how wonderful a person I am…how open and free spirited, not a drown of the ‘fashion/style/what’s new and wonderful and have to be a part of it like everyone else’ world…that I’m uniquely my own person and am more talented than I give myself credit for. And I’m overjoyed and amazed when someone values my skills more so than I believe them to be worth. Amazed…considering that most of the time I can’t get much recognition for my work. I’m not entirely sure why, though it might be do with my anti-social tendencies. I’m tired of the conventions…dealing with mass amounts of people…it’s the noise, honestly. I like peace and quiet.

And it might be why I’ve done better when I’ve picked up a commission during a primarily one on one conversation. Or a three way conversation…but either way…the crowd is smaller, and it is then that I get excited about the piece. My enthusiasm shines through more so in a quiet setting than it does in a noisy one. So…now…upon thinking about it and comparing personal experiences, I figured out now that though I might not be able to gain the recognition I might crave, or think that I want…but if I continue with just those personal conversations…one person at a time…then at least I’ve made a small step forward closer to being recognized. Heh…besides…aren’t the smaller things in life more precious and worthwhile?

Haven’t I always said that writing your thoughts out helped? Is anyone out there enjoying the chance to see how I make my revelations and help to bring peace to my scrambled mind again?

I did add trees, as you can see. But I didn’t get to type in my problems with them. My roommate had decided to occupy my computer by showing me Bob Ross’ ‘Happy Tree’ video footage…which made me laugh and reminded me of my high school friend that I had mentioned earlier a week or two ago. However, as appreciative I am of my roommate’s want to help me through my frustrations, he disrupted my routine, which made me more agitated than I normally get when I’m painting. Though…just looking at the thumbnails before I transfer the pictures from my camera to the computer…the trees kind of give a sense of depth to the painting…I think…

More than just Clouds.

My client did a lot of my research for me, taking pictures of his layout, looking up photographs of what kind of terrain and scene he was interested in, and even printing up some articles about how to paint a model train layout. A couple of things that stuck out in my mind were how one of the authors considered himself an impressionism era painter and then recommended using acrylic paint.

I can honestly say that in my years of experience, impressionism has got to be a fundamental basis of all painting and drawing. When you start out drawing, painting, anything…you’re primarily putting down your impression of what you believe to be drawing before you…be it from real life or your imagination. And it isn’t until you’ve spent the time to hone your skills and abilities before you’re able to move on from that impressionism stage. Assuming you want to move on. Usually, once I find a technique or material I like, I’ll exhaust myself using it in as many possible ways imaginable before setting it aside to learn or play with something new or different. Granted, it doesn’t give me much room to grow or better my abilities…or so I assume, but at least I’m enjoying myself, right?




But that leads me to the recommendation of using acrylic paint. In all honesty, when friends with…and I don’t mean to sound snobbish, rude, or superior over the matter, as I know I’m not considering I can’t make a living off of my art…that…and I can’t think of a more nicer way of putting it in my mind so of course I’m going to think myself as sounding like a bitch for saying this…anyways…where was I?



Oh right! When friends who haven’t had the same amount of training and practice as I have in painting and drawing ask me for advice on materials to use for something specific, I always tell them…use what materials your comfortable with. You can’t put out a good piece of work if you’re using something you’re not familiar with. Of course…with that said, I completely throw that advice away the first time I used gauge and turned out a painting that earned me one of my three A++’s from one of four different classes I had with the same teacher. That project alone…which I wished I had photographed for my records before I gave it to my father for his 60th who then thus had it framed…told me that gauge, an opaque watercolor type of paint was my media of perfection. And I hate using the word perfection, because I never consider myself that good, that wonderful, that…anything pertaining to the word. I’m not perfect, but I get pretty damn close to it whenever I’m using that particular media.



Granted, the foam core that the panels are made of have a smooth surface to which water based paints can’t easily stick to, but I did manage to find a way around that. Applying the watery paint to it with a wet brush, and then scuffing it over with a dry brush helped to make not only a rough enough surface for extra layers of the paint, but also helped to create the original horizon haze and even the misty clouds that I was working when I first started. How cool is that! And with that haze, I’m able to apply more layers of paint without having to scuff it up anymore…which makes painting in the rest of the scene, mountains and valleys and trees, a whole lot easier without the extra prep work I had to put in for the clouds to begin with. HAPPY ME!



Or at least so I thought. The main difference between the clouds and the rest of the terrain was the fact that with the clouds, I could use the blue base as it’s shade…and focus on just the whites for the highlights. With the terrain…I have to cover up all the blue, instead of using it as part of the shades. This leads to adding layers and layers and layers of paint before I even get remotely comfortable to where I don’t have to worry about the wetness of fresh paint possibly revealing the original blue under color. However, I will not let this get the better of me! I WILL PREVAIL! Please proceed to imagine me shaking my clenched fist up to the heavens in a defiant manner. Then smile.







Of course, it’s when you start mixing your medias…along with the way you apply the medias to the board, that things become messy and rather complicated. Completing the clouds and mountains in strictly a mixture of watercolor and gauge…both basically being one and the same only with the difference in transparency, I thought that I could get the best effect of grass and trees by using oils. But you see, I thought I was being smart, because a couple of months ago, I went and bought myself a sample pack of water soluble oil paints. And they’re really nice too, because in the way that they’re water soluble, you can mix your watercolors with them. So…I was having fun playing with that…and I’m sure things would have been find and dandy if I had kept to the same stroking technique I was using for the watercolors and gauge. But you see…I wasn’t. I was using not only different brushes to get the nice grassy effect I was going for, but the rough dabbing technique with such a watery substance my paint was in…ended up splattering and splashing color onto my mountains, clouds…and blank sky areas.

And trying to clean and fix that up…getting the greens and yellows out of a flat blue sky…not to mention the subtle bits of white I used to create the clouds. It’s disheartening. Sure…I wouldn’t have minded too much if this were a project of my own imagination and simply doing so for fun. But now? I feel like I should just sit down and cry…but the tears simply aren’t coming to me. Probably because the quiet rationalist in me is saying that it’s not the end of the world, and if I can’t fix it back to the niceness that it once was, I can at least paint over some of it in hopes that it will still look nice enough for the client. I’M HOPING! Much prayers will be uttered to the gods while I’m stressing over it the closer I get to completing this project. My main issue is the fact that I know where the mistakes are, and I’ll want to point them out…just to apologize profusely about it. I know this, because I’ll have someone like my roommate look at a piece. “Oh, that looks nice. It looks fine”…and such. And then I’ll point them out. “No! No it’s not fine! I messed up here, and here…and look at the yellow discoloration there. CAN’T YOU SEE IT?! GAH!” “Well…I didn’t notice it before…” Ok…now I can feel the tears coming on. Anyone want to donate their shoulder for me to cry on?









And in other news…my mother made my roommate a denim blanket for X-mas. Complete with a toy train underside. However, she primarily made it for the denim loving calico. Just look at how much she loves that thing!

I’m Painting Again!

Which is wonderful! A good thing! Especially since I’m getting paid for it. And though I’m probably taking longer on it than I probably should, it’s keeping me from stressing over bills and finances and such that I should be worrying about due to the lack of a job I once had. Then again, I have another one to hopefully look forward to in the coming months, which Lady Noble and I have been getting together and discussing over the past couple of weeks while Lord Noble works on fixing my main computer. In the mean time, I’m documenting the work I’ve gotten done for this project…which is painting the background panels of someone’s model train layout. And I thought it might be nice to share the progress here every week, just to show how things are coming along.



While I was painting this earlier, I was chatting with a friend over MSN and turned the webcam on so he could watch me paint. Not that he could see very well what it was I was painting, but I was generally having a good time being in a happy frame of mind and remembering a few of my high school art classes. When I was first working on some painting projects, I remember a friend of mine simply ignoring her own projects just so she could watch me paint. Just watching was in a sense therapeutic to her, and I remember promising her to videotape myself while we were in college incase things got too stressful for her and she needed to unwind.



Yeah…I’m horrible at keeping my promises, and I remember hearing that where she had gone to college had done a number on her health, but she’s now working as a pretty successful photographer…so…something must have gone her way. Anyways, it got me to thinking about figuring out a way to set up a webcam so that…well…anyone that’s interested could watch as I go along. Other than MSN, I’m not entirely sure how to go about that on here or any other site…but it’s a thought that I might take up with one of my few friends who know a little more about that kind of thing. When I get my main computer back, I’ll look into getting a camera for it and set it up in a way so people can better see what I’m doing, instead of watching me dance to the music I might happen to be listening to at the time.



So…anyways…more on the painting, what kinds of materials I’m using, and such next week. Enjoy!

The Big Four Oh.

This year, 2010...the start of a new decade in itself…just so happens to be the same year that three of the women in my family start a new decade in their lives as well. The first of us is my oldest sister…who we will lovingly call Statler, again from our sister Kermit’s blog.



As I was saying, the first to reach her birthday of the three of us is Statler, and incase you haven’t figured out how old she is, then I’m guessing the title hasn’t clued you in enough. ^_~ Oh well. It doesn’t matter, because like any of us in my family, she doesn’t look her age. I think it was only a couple years ago, someone asked for her license when she was buying a pack of cigarettes for her husband. She’s a whole ten years older than me, so I can honestly say that when growing up, we weren’t quite as close as me and Kermit were. But Statler still has as much love for me as our other sister, and I can tell that she’s looking out for me.



Our dad and I will argue day in and out about my sister’s hair. For the most part, I will always remember it as being red and incredibly curly. Even if we have pictures to prove my dad’s accuracy as to when he insists that she was originally a blonde. Despite those pieces of visual evidence, I still refuse to believe him. That coloration doesn’t fit her on so many levels, most of all her personality. Statler is bright, vibrant, giddy, excited, patient and well tempered…which is a strange trait to find in our family…ambitious, and most of all, positive. The red color of her hair just radiates positive energy in my eyes!



She started out going to school for physical education, and I think the only thing that she continued to pursue down that highly active role is taking classes in Irish Step Dancing. And I imagine she’s really good at it, because she’s been really eager for me to come up to see her in a recital. Considering I haven’t received an invitation in so long…I’m wondering if I’ve missed out on the chance to see her dance. I’d really like to. Heh…I remember when Statler and Kermit came to visit me for St. Patty’s Day weekend, the equivalent to New Orleans’ Mardi Gras in the city I live in, my oldest sister was so disappointed in the various schools of Irish Step Dancing that performed during the horribly long parade. (I’m so never sitting/standing through that again.) She explained to us that there is an actual routine made specifically parades, and that dancers are never stop their steps, just because there’s a pause in the walking. Impressive…and I can envision my sister doing it with those bouncing red curls.



And though most of my family is very supportive of my art, my mother still pushing the various character pieces I like to draw, Statler probably owns some of my most ambitious endeavors…or at least offered and given financial support towards a good number of them. Back when I was printing my first comic book, eager to see the third issue complete, she offered to loan me the printing charges for it. Granted, it never happened due to my dorm room’s evil AC unit, and my dying passion for the series…but I’m sure if I could get over the depression the storyline tends to put me in whenever I try to pick it up, I’m sure the offer would still stand.



She also allowed me to paint on the walls of her first house. I never got to work on the idea we had for her dining room, but I was able to complete her guest bedroom. Yes, my mother has allowed me to do so as well with her previous house, but nothing as wonderful and exciting as being able to paint one of my favorite creatures; the dragon. This was more along the lines of the Eastern style dragon, which are as equally exciting as your Western style dragon. When she had the idea of what she wanted in the room that would display her souvenirs from her trip to Japan, she first took me to a Chinese restaurant that had these neat swirling clouds on the exterior of the building. Add those to a couple of dragons, some kanji that reflect the ideals of love, hope, friendship, and peace, along with a bonsai tree on the closet doors, and we’ve got a room sized mural that I was rather proud of. Sadly…I don’t think I can find any of the pictures from it at this moment.



However, I do have pictures of the paintings I did for her new guest bedroom. Her husband…who apparently enjoys the fact that I will freely belch at the dinner table…put his foot down at the idea of me painting on the walls of their new house. Why is beyond me, but I’m doing my best not to hold it against him…because it allowed me to come up with a set of pictures (four of which are missing because she hung them up at her office) that not only took my sister by surprise, but took me by surprise as well. The paint I used was probably not the most ideal for the paper, but it was from the whole experience of working with it on two different occasions that I learned that I absolutely hated it. Yes, it’s nice to have a watercolor like paint that won’t pick up if you dab water over it again when it dries…but it also means you’ve got to be extra careful in how much you take out of the tube. Because like acrylic paint…once it’s out, and you don’t use it up…it dries and stays that way. Ugh. I can’t stand it.



So, because of my dislike for the paint, I wasn’t too pleased with the paintings. To my surprise, it seems that whatever I dislike turns out to be something everyone adores. I never take compliments that well to begin with, but it completely amazed me how much everyone was complimenting me on the first batch of paintings, but even more so on the second batch. It just blew me away, and actually had me smiling after a while. Which leads me to believe that my sister actually brings the best out in my work. She’s always understood my tastes, never forcing me to try something I’ve constantly snubbed my nose on. And for that, I love her. Thank you.



I’ve got a great idea for a quilt to hang in her dining room…so at some point I need to discuss it with you on materials for it. But until then, Happy Birthday, big sister! I love you and I hope today you have a blast!