rediscovering painting
Uncategorized
Hello, I’m an artist.
01216 days
by shuste73
in Uncategorized
No, not a new site, more like a relaunch. You see, about 8 months ago, my hosting company borked up my “hustedportraits.com” domain and it was going to some third party, so I reconfigured everything to my other domain, stevehusted.com. However, that’s just a site I wanted to use to ramble about non-art things, and I wanted clarity and continuity of purpose in my art blog…
So I was in a quandary: do I reconfigure hustedportraits.com or do I try to figure out something else? A few weeks after the snafu, which was inconvenient because it happened to coincide with my daughter’s birth and nobody could see all the nice pictures I took, which supremely annoyed me, they got hustedportraits.com back. Whoopsie, our bad! Well, too little, too late. I’m going to let that domain expire, I’m sure some domain squatter will sit on it for a while in hopes that they snatched up real estate they can hawk back at inflated margins. No such luck, sorry, guys.
I decided to put my mind to it this week and I came up with a solution: subdomains. Turns out my host, HostGator (they’re really good other than that snafu), updated their CPanel installation and it’s all snazzy now. So I was browsing around my available options and I had a flash of brilliance: why not just make subdomains?
So I made my gallery point to gallery.stevehusted.com, I made my non-art/Linux/music blog into regular ‘ol stevehusted.com, and I created artist.stevehusted.com, which is what you see now.
I think I like this solution – it simplifies things for me and doesn’t require me to reestablish on a new domain. It DOES give me a fresh WordPress installation, which I think I’d like to customize more, but not as much as the Tarski theme on the main site (which lost its customizations after upgrading this last time, but it was worth it – it’s a solid theme).
Now I’ll need to redouble my efforts at getting this thing going. I was going to do it in 2005, but my son was born and I spent time with him, and also got 27 credits in a graphic design program at AIU. Then, in 2006, I was going to do more but I got busy with my new job… then in 2007 I went on sabbatical from work, then in 2008 my daughter was born AND I did a very, very busy rotation into factory planning at Intel.
Phew!
Now, however, I think I’m finally settled down with no big work things happening, no school for at least a year (gearing up for the MBA because art is more business than painting/drawing – more on that later), no more kids on the way, so I’m kicking myself in the butt to get this going. I have a couple hundred article topics I’ve readied plus all the goodies that I think of all the time.
My next step is to get my art articles moved over here from the main WordPress blog, which shouldn’t be too hard because the style and the content are separate so it should be as simply as copy/paste/delete the old.
Ya’ll ready for this?
Homage to grandpa
01405 days
by shuste73
in Uncategorized
Not sure why, but a lot of people seem to like this picture. The school assignment was to use Photoshop (I used The Gimp) to colorize a portion of a black and white photo, and then to superimpose another picture on top.
I chose an old man in a hat superimposed with a carnation for a couple of reasons: my grandfather had recently passed and there were carnations at the funeral. Being the first time that someone died that I actually cared about, I was moved to pay tribute in whatever way I could (the image is NOT of my actual grandfather).
My 300M illustration
01405 days
by shuste73
in Uncategorized
I have a red 300M, but I drew a blue 300M based on a reference photo that I found.
This was done in Adobe Illustrator, but nothing that couldn’t be done in Inkscape.
Total time was about 40 hours.
Click on the image to see full size. I didn’t quite finish but still got an “A” on the project (my classmates had some downright AWFUL pieces – the assignment was to use Illustrator to draw a car).
- windshield wipers not drawn
- windshield itself needs additional rendering
- passenger side view mirror missing
- probably much more I can’t think of right now
Flowers (done with Illustrator)
01405 days
by shuste73
in Uncategorized
I used a lot of Gradient Mesh, which I hope to see in Inkscape very soon. This was a fun project and took about 26 hours.
Finding time and learning about art: chronicles of life with a 2 year old
01705 days
by shuste73
in Uncategorized
Yes, it can be done! I don’t really like watercolors much but I have managed to get a decent Crayola set and some better (but still not very good) brushes and some low-grade watercolor paper. I’m able to paint with my 2 year old around. Hallelujah!
Okay, so what I’m able to make between my 2 year old wanting to “erase daddy’s picture” is not really museum-quality stuff, but hey, I’m still making art and I’m also learning something. My biggest “aha!” is that the art is BETTER when we collaborate. My 2-year-old son and I, that is. I’m not sure why – maybe it’s that he forces me to work quickly and impulsively where I would normally think too much. He’s also not afraid to mix whichever-the-hell colors together that suite him at the moment, and to discard convention (being alien to him) and do things like water down the blue like crazy and then mash his brush into the paper until it’s almost completely dry. He’ll then come back later and wet it down as he’s noodling about. He’s made some surprisingly good pieces, actually. Better than some “professional” abstract artists I’ve seen, actually.
Meanwhile, I’m frantically trying to clean the green goo on top of the yellow paint and trying to keep that blue out of the red paint. Alas, as fast as I clean, he destroys (okay, FASTER).
I show him how to wet down a spot, drop in some color, and blow on it to spread the color; he’s immediately excited and sets about blowing on the paint in his own devil-may-care manner (usually involving a healthy amount of spit). Nevertheless, the results are fairly impressive and I’m proud of my budding artist – and, more importantly, he’s proud of himself. He runs off to show Mama what he’s made, grinning from ear to ear.
Impersonating an artist
01840 days
by shuste73
in Uncategorized
I was watching some home improvement show and the host made a comment about how the homeowner, who hadn’t painted in about 10 years, was “impersonating an artist.” I liked it so much I think I might just make it my tagline for my blog. I also like the term, “professional amateur,” promoting the idea that I’ve been an amateur portrait artist for so long that I’m actually a pro at it! Seriously, though, I have sold portraits and I’ve even given several really good ones away as gifts. I’ve just never really advertised that this is what I do. I don’t know why, I just haven’t. I’ve been impersonating an artist, and it’s time to stop impersonating and start being real.