I fancy myself a Linux aficionado. I also like The Gimp. Lemme set something straight – The Gimp is like Photoshop but doesn’t seek to replace Photoshop.

Lemme set something else straight: I used The Gimp in a graphic design class that required Photoshop. And I got an A in the class and the instructor (and everyone else) was none the wiser.

Now that I got that out of the way, I have to say that about 9 months ago I discovered that The Gimp had brushes, and that was the way to do the best stuff. Forget importing images and tweaking them – brushes have it down pat! So I messed around and my first image was a halloween drink menu for my wife (she’s a private bartender when she’s not in nursing school).

I got a new laptop at work so I had to reinstall my apps… along with The Gimp, obviously… so here’s what I did today after grabbing all the new brushes I wanted.

I’ve been eager to paint again but my time has been consumed with my main job at a Fortune 100 company, with my side job working for my mother-in-law, with my side job as the CIO of a startup with my Navy buddies, and, finally, as a painter. I’m pretty fucking busy, to say the least, but what I really want to do out of all this is to make art. So today was slow at work… and I used the time to do this. Not a total waste of time, mind you, because I use The Gimp all the time to whip out a quick graphic (logo, banner, icon, etc.) at work, so I do need The Gimp up and running well so I’m ready when called on, but the image started as I was playing with my new brushes and sorta blossomed from there. You artist types know what I’m talkin’ about. Dig.

But I learned something. If your art sucks, you probably won’t sell it, even on Etsy. You fucking retard.

First, make art.

Second, make GOOD art.

Third, steal a carcass for me. Mmm.

But the point I want to make is that I found several artists by searching the Etsy profiles of artists making a full-time living and/or have quit their day jobs. It’s inspiring. It makes me want to slam my face into the wall.

So I went to the galleries … the SOLD galleries of these artists to see what they were selling. Guess what? LOTS of crafts and jewelry. Painters were few, and of those, most were just coloring in drawings with acrylics. A few were doing oil paints. Many were making wonderful niches, like the lady that will make a woodcut-looking portrait from your photograph.

A couple of key things here…

1. Successful folks on Etsy tend to produce a LOT by making smaller, cheaper derivatives from their larger pieces – prints, art cards, even their images inside pendants, on teacups, plates, and a massive array of shit
   1. Make small shit
   2. If you can’t do that, make your big shit into small shit
   3. ?
   4. profits!
2. Successful folks on Etsy tend to have a strong visual style. Make cartoonish, doe-eyed dollish girly paintings? Stick to it. People eat that shit up. Doesn’t have to be earth-shattering, new, trendy, or anything like that – just have one! I know I struggle with this myself.
   1. Okay, well, if your style is bad, you won’t sell anything
   2. Come up with an idea that YOU like and run with it
3. Successful folks on Etsy tend to not just put up a store and expect people to flock to it. You have to utilize your other venues: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, your personal blog, giveaways (postcards), mailing lists, newsletters, etc. It’s a fucking business, in case you didn’t know

Ha! That’s really funny because I don’t have a studio. I have to drag everything out, unpack, set up, THEN I can start painting. In my kitchen. That’s not so bad. The hard part is breaking it all down when I’m done painting for the night – scraping down and wiping my palette, washing out and drying all my brushes, moving a still-wet painting on the easel to a safer place (kids and a cat and a dog, oh my!).

[sigh]

Garaged
I *tried* the garage, but Sacramento has 2 seasons: freakin’ hot and freakin’ cold and rainy. About 2 weeks between them on either end that are nice, and for about 4 years I managed to paint during those 2 weeks, but it wasn’t easy and quickly got either freakin’ hot or freakin’ cold.

Office-slash-studio
So I’m experimenting with putting my studio in my home office. We have a 3 bedroom house + office (with French doors!). The office is right off the dining room/living room/main entrance to the house and it’s not quiet at all. Hollow French doors and hollow walls don’t really help.

Not to mention that my office is a total mess. Or was. Or, well, half-is. I spent about 3 or 4 hours last night cleaning out my “computer graveyard,” as my wife calls it, and just flat-out tossing stuff. I had gone through the bookshelves (10 shelves quadruple-packed with books, with books on top, too) in the Fall and those are in the garage, in boxes, awaiting a trip to either the used bookstore or the Thrift Store. Or both.

Multipurpose space
The office isn’t a one-trick pony. It’s a workhorse. Now it’ll be even more so!

• Office space for when I work from home one day each week + evenings and some early mornings
• Home office for paying bills, sorting through the bank account, paying taxes, etc.
• Important paperwork storage
• Computer room
• Home studio (music recording on my PC, though haven’t done much of that since I usurped my mixing board for band practice)
• Managing and/all side businesses (there’s been a few, still a couple)
• Book storage
• CD storage
• Music room (guitar, bass, amp)
• Art studio!!!

Did I mention that this is a small, 10′ x 10′ space? I manage to cram a lot of crap into a small space.

It’s all about me, of course
I need a space where I can just go paint. Where I can sneak in and paint when I’ve got a half hour while the kids are watching Dora or otherwise engaged in making each other scream and cry. I need a space where I don’t have to completely build up and tear down every day. I need a space where I can be more productive. I need a space where I can use my computer at the same time that I’m painting.

The only down side is LIGHT. There’s no overhead light in the room and the window is in the sheltered area that is the front entryway, shaded by the garage and the dining room (the sidewalk is between them, the window is way back in the shadows). Ventilation is good, though – I can open the window in the winter and not worry about rain at all because I’ve got at least 5 feet or so of distance from where the rain can reach. I’ll need to see if the light is good enough or if I have to invest in one of those fancy art lights. Or maybe a full-spectrum bulb in a $5 clip-on would work?

What matters is that I just couldn’t seem to get anything to work in the painting I was working on today, which I can’t show you until the surprise is sprung. Anyway, I got pics and everything to show just how bad it got. Yes, I documented my shame. And I’m going to share it with you when I can (after Jan 31).

So… I persevered and kept at it and suddenly I realized I’d lost it. Not my mind; I lost that years ago. I lost the painting. It got away from me, a naked child running away and laughing. So I grabbed my palette knife and scraped the whole damned thing down, then rubbed it down with a turpentine-soaked paper towel.

I’ll teach you to run away, you little bastard!

Remember that I preserved the charcoal drawing with fixative, so I was essentially down to a toned canvas with my drawing. Square one, for all intents and purposes. Sigh.

I stood back and decided that I wasn’t going to admit defeat. Not me. Not today. I was going to do a value study. It was the color and the values that were getting the better of me. So I did the value study. And it came out great. But it’s in oil and I want to paint some more tomorrow night… so, um, I don’t know what to do with it now. No way it’ll be dry for about a month. I got a pic of it and I think I may chalk it up  to learning and move on. I have another canvas prepped but I decided to go bigger at the last moment.

The reference photo just isn’t working for me. It’s all browns – you can’t see any of the richness of the flesh, the underlying veins or rouge of the cheeks or any vibrancy in the shadows. So I’m struggling to basically paint a portrait in a series of yellows, oranges, and browns. LOTS of browns. And I don’t like it.

I might just throw caution to the wind and make the best of a bad reference photo by going hyper-creative and pushing an extreme coloring of the portrait. Or do something similar to my self-portrait series and go completely random and push my own style. I had wanted to do another really good, realistic portrait but I think I’m going to have to put that on the back burner because I don’t want to do a brown portrait.

Or, and this is an idea, I can tweak the value study with splotches of color here and there. Maybe draw a horizontal band and “colorize” that area. Hmm. That would work. And I’ve been itching to use some of my bench warmer paints. Hmm. I think I just helped myself figure out a solution. Thanks, self!

It remains that it IS hard to follow up. I suspect much of a book I’ve been meaning to get, Art and Fear, is about this very subject. I’ll probably read it and be thinking in my head the whole time, “Yeah, yup, uh huh, totally, exactly, YEAH, that’s me,” on and on. It’s a good ego stroke. And if there’s something I like, it’s to be stroked.

So, anyway, I do have something to say that actually ties in to the title of this post. I’m working on another portrait, but I can’t reveal it. Though the recipient, I guarantee, won’t come here… I suppose I can wait. Thought I don’t like to not have regular posts.

So far, I’ve done my color study in The GIMP (Photoshop-like app for Linux), I’ve done a charcoal drawing, and I went a little further with this one and something I’m trying to see if I can get my on-demand drawing skills back up to where they used to be.

(Back when I was in the Navy and single and bored and living in the barracks, I drew. And drew. And drew! It got to where I could whip out any ‘ol picture and make a really good drawing/likeness – in PEN – in the first pass. Those were the days of drawing for hours each day. Those were days that are looooooong gone.)

Instead of doing the drawing from my computer screen (how do YOU do commissions when all you get is a JPG?), I printed it out on my laser printer. I like to use it because it’s black and white and lets me do my drawing without the distraction of color. Oh, and color laser printers are farking expensive.

So, anyway, I tells Maude, ya see, that Doris told me that Ethel tells her that she overheard Frankie and he said…

Oh, sorry. I like to ramble at times.

I did a charcoal drawing directly on the canvas, trying to match the size of the printout exactly. Then, using tracing paper, I traced the printout and laid it over my charcoal drawing. Hmmm, I was pretty close on most things, but was off on a few key things – one of the eyes, the angle of the nose, and the neck line. But I was pretty close overall, and mostly pleased with myself.

[stops for applause, takes a bow]

Charcoal, in case you don’t know, comes off the canvas in a stiff breeze, unlike graphite (your trusty #2 pencil for you non-artists). I use a paper towel and it wipes right off. So I twisted the paper towel and selectively erased some parts and came back in with the vine charcoal and gave it another go. Then replaced the tracing paper to see how well I did. I got everything but one eye this time. Back at it again and I think I got it nailed.

I think this method keeps me honest in my drawing skills but also lets me quickly troubleshoot problem areas.

And, in all honesty, the first time I came through with the tracing paper I ended up wiping the charcoal off of the ENTIRE CANVAS. Ouch. It was that bad. The next time through, I relied less on measuring and more on just looking, feeling. Use the Force, Luke!

A coat of fixative to secure the charcoal in place and we’re set for a first layer of paint.

After the reveal, I’ll upload the process pics (yes, I have process pics!).

So to counteract that, I’m doing some drawing basics – copying Loomis drawings using his technique. Not my favorite technique, but a good technique nonetheless. And good to put charcoal to paper again. I’m dating them so I can see the progression (if I do this more than a few days in a row).

But I’m really no good at copying drawings that aren’t real people. I’m flat-out terrible, in fact. I’d love to get the Bargue book – but it’s a cool hundred bucks. Not in the cards for the time being.

So, in the mean time, I’m still here, I’m still drawing, trying to make it every single day, even though that ends up being 10pm or later. If you want it badly enough, you’ll endure. Or you’ll delay by doing anything but what you should be doing because your last painting was successful. And that sucks.

I’m told… well, I’m told but I don’t always listen to what I’m told.. that I should paint every day. Every single goddamned day. You know, like, daily and stuff. So I’m going to try. Though I’m telling you it’s hard. It’s really hard. But I want so badly to start selling my work that I have to run through my first 100 bad paintings before I start getting to the good stuff. And at about 10 paintings each month, that’s damned near the whole year.

Hey, I rhymed.

So here goes. I’m posting the ref photos even though it bugs the crap out of me to do it. Because then I’m ON THE HOOK, man. I’m freakin’ on the hook. [sigh]

Some notes: I realize that I’ve never done an Asian portrait before. I made this girl look caucasian. She’s Indian (East Indian, not Native American).

Her glasses are crooked or her eyes aren’t on an even plane. I’m not sure which. I’ll have to measure a few more times to be sure what it is. Also, her mouth has a grin/smile thing going on that I didn’t capture here that well. And her neck is darker than what I have. My stump did more erasing than blending. And I need to get the direction of the head correct – she sort of looks like her head is turned a bit but sort of doesn’t look like it. Her nose is off-center if her head isn’t turned. I might take a creative license here and do it how I think it looks best. It isn’t, after all, a commissioned portrait – and Karin Jurick (it’s her site!) said to have fun with it. Well. Um. Fun, here I come!

But I did get to do a charcoal on toned paper with both black and white charcoal. Which I’ve never actually done before. And I really like the effect – it gives a realistic glow to the image.

I’m going to take my study and overlay it to the original image in The GIMP (Photoshop alternative for Linux) and see where I went wrong. I did do this while watching about 4 episodes of The Office. It took me about an hour and that hour went by really quickly. So it goes.

Sometimes I just look at them in The GIMP. Sometimes I digitally manipulate them – increase brightness, contrast. Sometimes I blur them so I can see the masses better.

Today, I applied a GIMPressionist filter to simplify the image down to color swatches.

So you get the idea – it breaks down the colors. I also spent about a half hour using the “eyedropper” tool in The GIMP to pull out colors. I’m ALWAYS amazed – “Really, that’s the right color?” I ask myself. Sure enough, if you isolate it, it’s right. But looking at the picture as a whole, you don’t see that. The color swatches you see with this filter actually help quite a bit – you can see what looks like detail but it’s actually very washed out. And I can see that I need a traditional portrait palette, so it helped me decide on:

• Cad Yellow Light
• Yellow Ochre
• Cad Red Medium (not normally on my palette)
• Alizarin Crimson
• Burnt Sienna
• Burnt Umber
• French Ultramarine
• Viridian Green (yes, this is a new color to my palette)
• Ivory Black (okay, I’m mixing this from Ultramarine and Burnt Sienna)
• Titanium White

**NOTE** Some important stuff – no white in her eyes. All greys. Don’t believe what your noggin’ tells ya. There’s actually NO pure white on this whatsoever. Though I’ll probably make the brightest brights from straight-from-the-tube Titanium White.  I bumped up the contrast so there’s a wide range of values here. Probably 1-10, though I’ll likely simplify the values and not quite use all 10 of ‘em. Or I’ll wait for the hot whisper in my ear as I’m painting it to tell me what to do. Yeah. That’ll do.

I’d like to do a value study – I’ve already desaturated the image digitally so I can see what’s to be expected. I’ll probably spend a LOT of time getting the landmarks place correctly – pupils, nostrils, corners of mouth. Once those are in, I can fudge the livin’ shit out of it and it’ll still look decent.

Above all, I’m scared that I’ll fuck this up. I don’t know why. I just have high expectations for myself and I end up convincing myself that I’m never going to achieve the vision I have for this piece. But at least I *have* a vision, so that’s something most people never get to.

I might have to take my advice again – break the toy. I should trademark that shit.

Seriously, though, I’m probably going to have to do a few. I haven’t painted a serious portrait in years. Except my 5 self-portraits, which I still have to finish #5 (my mother-in-law told me to leave it as-is and I’m seriously considering that – talk about knowing when to stop painting!). But those weren’t stuff that I’d do on commission. They were revealing, personal inquiries into myself. They told me stories and slapped me around like a Nancy-boy when I deserved it. They were friends, except when they weren’t. They were trysts in the night. They were harlots and she-devils and succubi come to tempt my flesh.

They won.

But enough about me. Now to grab the charcoal and work up some sketches for the DSFDF challenge/swap/skull basher.

Update: here’s the picture I’m painting. I hesitate to post this because now I’m on the hook for a likeness. Ouch.