rediscovering painting
Ideas
Find your style, make a living off Etsy?
0684 days
Etsy. I just opened a store. But I used a bad name that I thought was just a user name, not my fucking STORE NAME. For chrissakes. No matter. I’ll fix it.
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…
- 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
- Make small shit
- If you can’t do that, make your big shit into small shit
- ?
- profits!
- 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.
- Okay, well, if your style is bad, you won’t sell anything
- Come up with an idea that YOU like and run with it
- 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
Portrait challenge
0893 days
I got my image for the DSFDF portrait challenge… er, uh, maybe it’s not a challenge, maybe it’s a portrait swap? Hmm. I’ve had some ideas but I’m not sure which way to go.
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.
Self portrait #4
0920 days
Self portrait #4, 11″ x 14″, oil on canvas board, preliminary drawing, WIP
I had a painting I had done about 2 years ago when my son was 2. It was just me and him messing around. Mostly me trying to keep oil paints out of a 2 year old’s eyes and mouth. It began life as a terrible self-portrait so I intentionally ruined it with my kid. I scrubbed the canvas and then I sanded it down. Oil paint isn’t the best sanded material, in case you’re wondering. So I decided to go over it with a dark, dark brown. It’s been that way for 2 months. I have 2 other self-portraits prepared, but I’ve lost the muse on them. I might just paint over them.
So it goes.
I took a picture of myself with my digital camera, cropped it and shrunk it to fit the 11″ x 14″ canvas, and modified it in The GIMP (Photoshop-like clone for Linux) with the “photocopy” filter. That basically takes it down to an outlined drawing. Then I opened OpenOffice Presenter (PowerPoint clone) and made a 1-pager with a portrait orientation and a size to match the canvas. I dragged my image onto it, printed at actual size (my printer only does 8.5″ x 11″, so it printed 3 sheets’ worth), I traced the details I was concerned with onto tracing paper, rubbed white conte crayon onto the back, and then re-traced over the tracing paper to transfer the image to the canvas.
Next, I’ll spray it with fixative to make sure the conte crayon drawing doesn’t smudge. Then it’s ready for painting.
I haven’t decided how to paint this yet. I’m thinking that I should keep it dark. And drippy. And maybe lace in some wording/verbiage as it comes to me. I might just pull out enough lights to make it recognizable, attack it with thinner, pull out some more lights, and thrash with thinner again. I liked the effect I got yesterday so I want to get to it before it makes me want to pound nails through it. Hmm, now THERE’S an idea…
I want to be an artist.
0935 days
“I want to be an artist.”
Those are the words I said back in 1987, my freshman year of high school, to my guidance counselor. I was 13 years old. He was a dull-looking man with pale skin, well-trimmed beard, short, black hair, and a glass eye. I don’t remember his name but I do remember that glass eye.
I wonder if glass eyes have gotten any better since then?
I was asked what I want to do “when I grow up” as a way of mapping out the classes I should take in high school. I ended up taking a LOT of art classes. I think that sometimes Mrs. Hammerman really disliked me but couldn’t do much about it because I was her little star pupil (much to my chagrin – I didn’t really like the attention, which made it all that much easier for me to push her buttons). In my senior year I had 2 study halls and always managed to get a pass to go paint. I was in Painting II and Directed Study, which was where I painted some more.
I would stand there in my backwards, oversized button-up shirt, Walkman on, and paint.
And, boy, did I love it.
Things went downhill after high school – the military left me bereft of art opportunities and I had built up a nice salary and a corresponding lifestyle by the time I left the military 8 years later.
Then I settled in and put the dream on ice.
Then I started to write out my ramblings and ideas on Facebook last year. As more and more people joined, I got more and more heat about it, and I eventually stopped. Now I’ll still write but I’ll do it on a scrap of paper that will promptly make its way to the recycle bin. My ramblings haven’t stopped, I’ve only stopped sharing them.
However, what I really wanted to untap was the artistic flow that I had stopped up all those years ago. Gone were my lame excuses. It was time. I STILL wanted to be an artist. I still WANT to be an artist. I AM an artist.
So I dove in one September night and painted a picture, Summers End. I was hooked.
It’s been just shy of 2 months and I’ve completed a decent number of paintings.
I work at a Fortune 500 company. I can’t say I hate it, because I don’t, but it’s mostly dull but mostly pays the bills. I’ve been coming to a slow realization as I read Ayn Rand’s “Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal” and reading Seth Godin and catching up to successful artists on Twitter that I’m a wage slave. I can’t quit my job. I can’t stop working today. I’m a slave to it. And a deep, dark loathing bubbles up inside of me to even type out those words. This isn’t who I was supposed to be.
So what should I do?
I should be who I’m supposed to be. It seems pretty obvious, but, like all things that seem easy and obvious, it’s all-at-once difficult and simple. It’s its own paradox.
I will break out and continue with my themes. I will capture the fleeting thoughts and ideas on my blog, on scraps of paper (that I’ll keep instead of making them grist for the 80% post-consumer waste mill), and on the voice recorder in my cell phone. I will continue to draw, the watch inspirational art movies (I just watched “Helvetica” and I could really relate to the guy that said “bad taste is ubiquitous”), I will continue to PUSH myself.
Sometimes I have an idea and I’m afraid I can’t reach that one quite yet. Sometimes I paint total crap and share it, anyway. Sometimes I see myself through perspective of dissociation, sometimes I sketch it. I have some ideas that I pursue and they become impractical. I have some feelings I forget before the shower is over. I have drawings in canvas where I’ve lost the muse; I have others where I’m afraid to destroy the drawing with paint.
Above all these things, though, I have a goal: I want to be an artist.
Shadows of me
0950 days
So, first, I realized I’m only on my third self-portrait in the series of 5. And I’m not quite sure how to pull together tonight’s painting – I’m going to let it lead me in our subtle dance. I have documented some loose ideas for the other 2 – one’s an old post here and one’s on the nifty voice recorder on my cell phone. Though I’m struggling with one idea. I might pitch it to the bin. The circular file. Yes, the inimitable shitcan. Well, it’s actually a virtual shitcan, but you get the idea.
I was looking at Linda Apple’s bicycle shadow paintings yesterday and my brain did a lightning cross-check of stuff I’ve done, and I had a minor epiphany. Just minor, nothing big. Okay, more like a “duh” moment. I often take pictures of my own shadow. Yes, I’m a dork. So my wife tells me. And she’s probably right. But what just came together was a menage a trois of inspiration (bicycle shadows + my taking pictures of my own shadows + self-portrait series) – series 2, another 5 self-portraits, this time with my shadow lying across various objects, or showing me doing things. I’ve got some tungsten lamps in the garage that will make some nice shadows if the sun doesn’t cooperate.
I can also use this as a platform to get a little more detailed in my paintings. I can burn through 5 of my smaller canvases, toying with detail that way. I can play with contrast, exaggerating colors and values. I can play with various techniques for massing large areas. Hmm, perhaps some additional limited palette exercises.
(as an aside, I accidentally created Burnt Sienna last night from my Payne’s Gray mixture (“colorful black”) and cad red medium – these are things you’ve just got to experience by slapping down some paint on the palette and sloshing it around and asking yourself, “Self, what happens if I do *this*?”)
Eventually, I’ll get to the point where even my bad days are great pieces. For now, though, soldier on and learn, learn, learn by continuing to paint, paint, paint.
Did you ever notice how paintings are somehow disappointing when you get close up? It’s like you expect to see MORE detail when you get closer, but you just see how the artist deftly fooled your eye. I end up feeling a little let down but at the same time I get inspired because I see the mystery unravel before me. And I realize that I can do that, too. And I will. Soon. By exploring some Shadows of Me.