2014 in a Nutshell

I haven't been very good about updating this for the past 4 months, but at least work has been getting done.  And because it's the end of the year and I have a little bit of breathing space, I want to talk about my year so that next year when I read this I'll know what did, what I learned and what I accomplished.

So in 2014, I really tried to focus on traditional art and painting.  At the beginning of the year I put a bunch of work into learning figure drawing from Bridgman and working on my drawing in general.  In February I did another illustration for Spellbound.  I also focused on more creative sketching again and started a Tumblr sketchblog.  (Well, mostly a sketchblog.  I have Views and sometimes I have to reply to something a friend has said because Someone is Wrong on the Internet.)  I also did some book illustrations in ink.

In March I discovered Sketch Dailies and exercised my creativity.  In April I failed to get some illustration jobs but did some great ink work.  Sometime in spring I also applied to a gallery and some exhibitions and was rejected.  I also wrote a short story for Spellbound's Spindles and Spellbound anthologies, which was rejected but the editor liked the story and suggested I resubmit to the magazine later in the year.  Unfortunately Eggplant Publishing has shut its doors so the story will have to find a new home somewhere else.

In May I did more sketching.  In June I realized that Art Walk was coming up and took on a painting challenge, to do 50 paintings in 90 days.  I didn't quite make it but I painted a lot of stuff between the beginning of June and end of August.  I did great at Art Walk 2014 and met a very nice lady who owns a tea shop who not only bought one of my paintings but gave me space to display my art.

September kind of fell off the map.  I think that after painting daily for months I ran out of subjects that interested me, and also had an unfortunate encounted with stinging insects that made a couple weeks out of the month unbearable.  I submitted paintings to the Spruce Grove art competition and didn't place.  This made me rethink my painting style and led to experimentation with more abstract landscape in October.

I rallied in October and got a lot of work done.  I painted a new set of autumn and winter paintings for the tea shop, did a couple of weeks of Inktober, and tried to expand my network.  In November I had the flu which took 3 weeks out of my life but managed to restock the tea shop and discovered that I'd made a sale.  I also participated in a show and sale for emerging artists run by one of the local politicians and was introduced in the Legislature as one of the artists that contributed.  I doubt that anyone remembered my name 2 seconds after it was spoken, but I am now in the Legislature record and that is somewhat cool!  Also the Legislature building is very interesting and the whole experience was worth having.

In December I did a few paintings but mostly have tried to organize my house and socialize, as well as plan some projects I want to finish next year.  Unfortunately my comic output fell behind in the last couple of months but I am 2/3 through putting together a book.  I've also set up a portfolio site for my paintings and finally got new business cards.

So although the year seems slow and underfunded, I have been moving forward, I think.  I had a bad couple of months but looking back, the rest of my year has been quite productive and I have tried harder to improve myself and get my work out there.  I think that with my new style I am moving forward in painting.  Perhaps I will move in a different direction in the future, but especially in October I have been finding fun in painting again.

Thanks to the generosity of my in-laws we are now debt free and are planning a move next year when my husband finishes school.  2015 is looking like it's going to be a terrifically busy and exciting and frightening year, as we do not know where we are going or what anything will be like when we get there.  I am hoping to sketch a lot more to record the city that I am leaving and perhaps even publish a sketchbook about it.  There is an interesting exhibition in January that I would like to apply for.  My sketch group might be holding an exhibition of sketches sometime in mid-2015.  And I would like to make a completely unreasonable number of paintings in 2015 as well as take up cycling seriously again.  I don't know if any of this is possible but I am going to try hard to make completely unreasonable things happen! :)

In the meantime Happy New Year's to all and may your own goals come true.  I know nobody really checks this blog but for those who do, thanks for being there for me.  You've all been wonderful.  I have no bad friends, even the quiet ones are great! :)

2014 Paintings 1

June was all about paintings.  I got about 25 paintings done through almost-daily practice, mostly landscape, mostly from photos I've taken on my travels over the years.  It was a good exercise, I'm kind of sorry I stalled out right after Art Walk.  Neil left for his conference, there was a heat wave that made working in the studio unpleasant and I spent a week in the basement among some of the greasiest dust bunnies I've ever encountered.  The next couple of paintings went particularly poorly.  It's enough to stall anyone.

While I'm trying to get back to the studio I'll be working on pencil crayon stuff, comics and sketches.  In the meantime I might as well show off the fruits of my labours.  All acrylic on hardboard.

Evening Sail.  From a photo I took on Vancouver Island a few years ago.  Sold at Art Walk to a nice lady who is displaying my art in her tea shop right now.

Farm Shack.  From a photo I took last year near Sherwood Park.

Chair Garden.  From a photo I took in Montreal a few years ago.

Montserrat.  From my Barcelona photo set.  I quite like the textural look one gets on rocks by applying paint with a palette knife.

Above the Badlands.  I quite like this one.  Not sure anyone else did, but I don't care.  I snapped a bunch of photos from the car on our Drumheller/Waterton trip.  Love those Alberta fields!

This was a good learning experience and I should really continue it.  I'm not sure I learned a whole lot more about painting, but I sure learned a lot about choosing a subject!

Bullfrogs

This month has been particularly bad for me for painting (although I'm getting lots of illustration done, so that's something).  I eventually resorted to looking over my WIPs and dragged this guy out.  I had started it last year or possibly even the year before.  I had painted the frogs and the rocks, got to the silly day-glow reeds and that's where it languished for months.  Frogs, easy.  Reeds, hard.

I may end up cropping it at some point to remove the reeds.  I'm not too fond of them, but the rock is pretty nice.  That will have to wait until I can access my table saw, though.

Anyway, this was from a photo my husband took at an aquarium while we were on vacation a few years ago.  I think these were American Bullfrogs and man... their terrarium was crawling with crickets and despite the frogs' best efforts they did not manage to eat a single one while we were there.  At one point the frog launched itself towards a cricket, fumbled critically and the cricket ended up crawling on top of the frog's head.  I guess the aquarium caught the dumb ones and the smart ones are still out in the wild.

I enjoyed painting the frogs.  This year I'm going to try and get more photos of animals and maybe include more of them in my landscapes.  I'm really looking forward to plein-air season, but it looks like it's going to arrive late this year.

Palette Knife

One nice thing about working with the palette knife, as frustrating as it is, is that it gets me to use a great deal more paint than I normally would.  I have always been a saver, I use materials sparingly and only let loose when it's obvious that I am about to drown in art supplies.  I have also been told that the way I use acrylics is unusual (which it probably is, as I started painting in acrylics after a number of years spent painting digitally and the latter definitely has influenced the former).  So I have fallen into the "it's my style" trap a little, thinking that if my work is unique it must also be good.

But I get bored.  I get bored and then I hear about a thing and I immediately want to try it.  I ended up buying this case of palette knives at Lee Valley on a whim several years ago and when I saw Linda Wilder's wonderful mountain landscapes I had to drag them out and try to use them.  (There aren't many role models for the landscape painter in acrylics, every time I see a painting I like it's either in oils or pastels.  And while I'm willing to give oils a go, I am extremely hopeless with pastels and Neil tells me that they will give me rainbowlung.)

So palette knives.  It's like painting with spackle.  My first attempt was a total disaster which I eventually rescued with a bristle brush.  The second attempt was a half-total disaster, but people inexplicably liked it.

This is my third attempt:

 

This is the Japanese Garden at the Butchart Gardens in Victoria.  I enjoyed the gardens there tremendously, although they were rather crowded.  It wasn't until we hit the Japanese Garden and it started raining a bit that the crowds thinned out.

With this painting I think I am finally starting to get somewhere with the palette knife.  I really like how it turned out.  And I think I am in denial about the colours I like.  Neil and I were joking about people buying paintings to match their sofa, and I remarked that the colours in this painting would make for rather hideous decor.  Then I took it into my living room and it matches not only my sofa, but the walls and rug as well.  It goes with them so nicely that now I am thinking of painting a three foot tall version and sticking it up on my wall.  So I apparently am not only the sort of person who likes orange and green, but the sort of person who matches paintings to the sofa.  Go figure.

A New Leaf

So I think I would like to try something new with this blog for 2013.  I've been thinking about it since this summer, and while having a sketchblog has been good for my productivity levels, I've also thought that it hasn't been as useful to other people.  I like to comparmentalize so I split off other things to other blogs but splitting my attention hasn't worked out so well.  Maybe this year, instead of spending all my time writing for forums it's time to put it all together in one place and be useful for a change.

Everyone seems to be using this day for reflection, so maybe I'll start this off by looking back at my year.

I did a lot of children's illustrations in January and February, really trying to replace old work in my portfolio.  I did one illustration for Spellbound Children's Magazine and submitted several to the SCWBI bulletin because why not.  In March I picked up a job to do several illustrations for a self-published RPG book that has just come out, that ended up being 7 illustrations over the course of several months.  I'm looking forward to showing off a few of them.  For some reason March seemed to be the month for surrealism.  I did a lot of sketches of strange things that didn't make much sense.

Things really slowed down in April.  I was probably still working on those RPG illustrations.  In May I realized that Art Walk was coming up and started doing some more traditional pieces to sell.  June was mostly sketching and RPG illos and working on small paintings for Art Walk.  In July I did another illustration for Spellbound and started finishing and framing last year's paintings to sell.  I sold a few things at Art Walk and that reminded me that I really like plein air painting, especially in August when the weather is nice.  I finished 10 paintings between August and November.

In October I discovered Daily Spitpaint, which I did as a warm up for a bit.  I tried doing Inktober for a while but didn't get very far.  I don't know where November went.  The start of winter is always hard.  I finished a couple longer paintings and otherwise sat around being depressed.  At the end of November I picked up a job doing illustrations for a theme park proposal.  I needed to do 11 illustrations in 2-3 weeks and I basically lived, breathed and ate digital art until five days to Christmas.  I got news back from the SCWBI bulletin that one of my illustrations will be published in the January issue.

In addition to all that I showed up to almost every monthly Urban Sketchers meeting and did several nice ink sketches every month, and made about 75 comic strips for that comic nobody is supposed to know about

I also set out to do my first metric century on my bicycle so I also biked somewhere between 7 and 100km 6 days a week between May and September.  By the end of the summer, riding to Beaumont (about 40km) was a long daily ride rather than a significant undertaking.  I am still no thinner, but my legs are like rocks.  Fat stubby rocks.  And in November, tired of sitting around feeling sorry for myself, I took up swimming.

What did I learn this year?  That I can really put the work in if I am sufficiently motivated, and what I need to figure out is how to be sufficiently motivated more often.  I've learned that I should play to my strengths because they're going to turn into opportunities that I could never expect.  I've learned that I should bite off a little more than I can chew because I can do more than I think I can.  I've learned that I really need a schedule and that I need to talk to a lot more people about my art.

I think I'm slowly learning to waste less time arguing on the net.  That's a hard one.

Anyway.  Tomorrow I'm going to outline some plans for 2014 and after that it's time to get back to work, hopefully with a new purpose!

For now, here's a composite of the major paintings I made in 2013.

Here's to many more!  Happy New Year, everyone.

Orchid

I managed to get a tiny bit of painting done at the Muttart in November.

Buffalo Jump Hills

Still playing with oils a bit.  This is a second go at this acrylic painting I did two years ago.  It's kind of recognizeable as hills now.

There's a few good things going with this picture, and a few other things I really ought to change.  Maybe I still will.  One can futz around with oils pretty much indefinitely if that's what floats one's biscuit.

Candle Flame

The fall colours have been amazing, but I had a lot of trouble finding a good place to paint this week.  I went out on Sunday to the ravine and although this tree struck me right away, I couldn't commit to it and ended up further down the trail by the water.  I got one of my shoes wet crossing Whitemud Creek, and the other wet crossing back again because the lighting was crap from the other side.  After a half hour of sketching the creek was invaded by children and I gave up.

I came back on a weekday, this time determined to paint the first nice thing I saw and the tree was right where I'd left it.  So here it is, like a brilliant candle flame glowing against the hillside.

While I was sitting there, one of the biggest bumblebees I had ever seen decided to explore my paint bag, my shoe, and my leg all the way up to my kneecap.  I gave it a ride down on a fallen leaf, but it was not interested in being on the ground floor and it flew off with a sulky baritone buzz.  A perfect capper to what is likely one of the last beautiful days of the year.

Assiniboia Lilac

Perspective! My nemesis! So, at last we meet for the first time for the last time!

I started this... I think in May 2012, and it has sat in the pile of unfinished paintings until I pulled it out and decided that I wanted to try something different with the light and shadows. The building is one of the oldest on the U of A campus, where I spent some time in my undergrad years having labs, then teaching labs, and then -- after I graduated -- changing backup tapes in the basement. It now houses the Philosophy department, where I also spent a few of my post-graduate semesters.

Lilac season on campus is lovely, following flowering crabapple season which starts real spring off with a bang. (There is also fake spring which starts on March 21, is alternately brown and snowy, and lasts for 2 months.) It is by far my favourite time of the year.

Dry Island Buffalo Jump 2

2 years ago I went on my first plein-air painting trip out to the Drumheller area. I have some very fond memories of that trip, and also some highly questionable artwork and lots of reference photos and studies.

When I got a set of oil paints and a vague clue about how to use them, I decided to revisit this scene. I have learned a lot about landscape painting since that trip, and I was curious whether I could apply it to oils as well as improving an old painting. I think that I'm happy with the result.

For comparison, here's the first version, painted on location.

Oils on hardboard, 9x12".

Curve of the Creek

  

So far I think this may be my favourite painting of 2013.  You can read the story behind it here

Amongst the Reeds

This was started the same day that I did the old train a few posts back.  I had such a lousy sketching session that I stopped at this little pond near a church to do some painting.  Unfortunately my arrival startled the ducks but I saw a large muskrat, some grebes and some darting swallows overhead.

After I'd been there for half an hour, a couple of coots came out. And the hilarious thing is that they started grunting, which is a bizarre sound halfway between a quack and a fart. I couldn't keep my face straight because these black duck-like objects were floating just off the left side of the painting going "fffrrrrttack". If my camera had been working I would have put them into the picture but as it was still wet I had to leave it at inanimate objects.

This is a very small painting, so most of it was finished on location.  I did a bit of refining in the studio but otherwise it stands.  It's very... blue.  I don't usually use phthalo, it's a bit overwhelming, even in small doses.

Acrylic on hardboard, 8x6".

Bridal Falls

I thought I'd experiment with the palette knife again.  Difficult but fascinating!

From a photo I took at Bridal Falls in British Columbia.  I've never met a waterfall I wasn't willing to stop for.

Acrylic, 8x9".

Sunflowers

Today I finished this painting I started last week, out in a field not far south of my house.

I ended up on this three-foot-tall dirt hummock in the middle of an enormous weed patch.  I liked the way that the weeds rose up around me and framed the field.  Sadly I muffed up the composition.  If I had the chance to re-do this, I'd use a bigger board so I could include the plants on the left, and I'd pull the sunflower above the horizon.  Next time I'll take more reference photos and do some composition sketches to start with.

Acrylic on hardboard, 9x12".

Blackfoot Beaver

 

I thought it was a bit shameful that I didn't make it out to paint very often this year, what with the cycling and all, so I decided to remedy that by going out to Cooking Lake-Blackfoot Provincial Park.  It didn't look like it was going to be an auspicious trip.  I started late, and I got a bit lost on the way, second-guessing myself and then third-guessing and then getting stuck waiting for a train.  I finally made it there only to discover that I was at the wrong entrance, but it was too late to remedy that.  While walking I realized that it was very hot and humid and I didn't feel very good at all.

I started out along one of the trails looking for a lake, and then wasted time trying to find a viewpoint from which I could actually SEE any lake.  The water level was so high that it was puddling around the bottom of the heavy brush surrounding the lake and I couldn't work my way around to any area that was dry enough to sit on that didn't have trees or bushes in the way.

I eventually gave up, went down the other trail and after a bit of exploring I discovered this shallow bit of water, surrounded by reeds and thorn bushes.  There was an old wooden platform to sit on but I found a dry spot right on the edge of the water.

After I had set up and spend some time painting there, I heard a splash.  I was hoping for waterfowl but instead I got this beaver.  It swam out a few meters away from me and then spent quite a long time chewing on the stick, stripping it of bark.  It left, but came back some minutes later, dragged the stick away, then came back and dug another stick out of the muddy lake bottom.  My whole time painting was punctuated by periods of industrious beaver chewing.

It is interesting how similar beavers look to capybaras when they are in the water.

Anyway, I got everything laid in while I was there, and then finished it up over a couple days at home.  I got some really nice close-ups of the beaver with my camera.  I really like how the logs on the left turned out and the backlit grasses.  The bottom of the painting is not so successful, I may end up cropping an inch off it.

But anyway -- the first decent painting of 2013!  I believe this is my 77th painting.  Hopefully I can get closer to 100 by the end of the year.

Peonies

 

The last painting I finished this year before Art Walk.  Some peonies from my garden, painted plein-air.  I was trying out glazing again.  These turned out slightly better than last year's rose!

Acrylic on masonite, about 9x12".  Soon to be available in my Storenvy store!

Warmup - Llama Leader

At first I thought the shape was a giant flower with a flamingo coming out of it, but clearly it was a kid in a weird hat leading a white llama.  Silly me.

Warmup - Ace of Spades

Apparently the series of animals is over for now.

I think this one turned out pretty well, even considering the stupid cropping and tangents.  An odd composition but maybe it works with this guy.

Hay Bales

Some hay bales at the University Farm.  It was a lovely fall afternoon and I had a nice painting session as random cyclists rode across the field right behind me.  After the light changed I sketched the barn in the distance and then went to look at some experimental peas.

Whitemud Duck

This was a plein-air painting I started in the fall of 2012.  Finally finished it up.  Although now that I'm looking at it I can see a few more touches I might like to add.

It was a lovely fall day out at the ravine.  I should get out to paint more often.