Prints To Send Around The World

Well, now that I’ve officially graduated from college, I’m trying to read several books that I never had time to read.  It’s a somewhat ambitious project – why does time seem to shrivel up and shorten as you get older?  Anyhow, I’ve been on a big sketching/transforming sketches into prints kick lately.  Also shoes… more on that later.

I wanted to at least put a better image up of my print of the Saint Paul Riverfront.  The paper I chose for the editioning is this really gorgeous paper-thin, yet strong, paper with pieces of bark or something in it.  Love it.  This particular print is one of the edition I pulled last week – there are thirteen still available, so definitely contact me if you would like one!  They are $8 apiece, and if you need me to send it via mail it will probably cost $10 to include some of the shipping.  Dimensions are  7″ x 10″ if I remember correctly.

 

Saint Paul From Indian Mounds Park, linoleum print, Taylor Champoux 2013.

I have a couple of “mess-up” prints, and I have BIG PLANS for them!  One is already entrusted to a coworker of mine who is headed to Peru for the summer.  She has been instructed to find a new home for the print, somewhere where another person should be able to find it.  I want people to see things.  I want to make prints of the places I love and send them worldwide, folding them into squares and hiding them in secret niches or small crevices.  Whoever finds it will feel as though they have stumbled upon a little secret, and they will also be able to travel imaginatively to the place that I have depicted.  In this case, the stunningly beautiful Saint Paul riverfront.  There is so much beauty in the world and not nearly enough time to see it all, so I am just helping humanity along by sending snapshots from my home to theirs…

Let me know if you’re going somewhere and would like to help me out – I don’t have tons of prints at the moment, but hopefully in the future I will!  I would love to give you a “homeless” print.  : )

Oh, and shoes.  SHOES SHOES SHOES.  Being an artist, I couldn’t just go to graduation in my normal, boring, grad robes and mortarboard.  Definitely not.  So, at the last minute, I noticed the pair of white Target knock-off Keds that I had bought for $8 a few months back with plans to decorate.  Needless to say, they were still white.  I quickly grabbed a few Sharpies (limited color palette for the win) and copied some sketches from my sketchbook onto them. They are both pictures of the Saint Paul riverfront, drawn from essentially the same spot, but looking in opposite directions.  I think they turned out pretty awesome for only taking 25 minutes or so, and it felt cool to see people look twice at my shoes when they happened to notice them.  Awesome.

Saint Paul Riverfront Shoes (sharpie on white sneakers)

I am not available to do commission work at the moment because of my upcoming trip to Germany, but if you are interested in commissioning anything from me – paintings, drawings, prints, shoes, whatever – please just shoot me an email at taylorchampoux@hotmail.com !  I would be more than happy to work with you, and my prices would definitely be reasonable and negotiable.  For shoes, as an example, I would probably have you buy the shoes you’d like “artified”, and I would then just be responsible for decorating them.  : )

(Sidenote:  I don’t have a PayPal account or anything like that set up yet, but I will do so eventually.)

Commissions will be back in swing come August, but I’ll update the blog about when I’m up for them again – so keep following me!  I’m going to document my German adventures here, too, so it’ll be an awesome summer for all you virtual travelers coming along for the ride.

Waaaaah okay.  Time to continue attempting to learn German (ich spreche Deutsch?  Nein.) so I’ll peace out for now.  New print coming soon, whenever I get access to the print studio…

“We Come To It At Last.”

It’s here.  Graduation and commencement is a week from Saturday, and I can hardly believe anything anymore.  My art is currently installed in the Macalester art gallery (the opening reception was last Friday) and I am finishing up my finals in the next few days.  Wow.  Gandalf, your words are impressed upon my memory at this moment that marks great changes to come.

Reflecting back on my time in college, it has been nothing short of eye-opening, challenging, and an invigorating thrust forward of independence.  My memories seem so old and fragile, but I know they aren’t really that old at all – a strange sensation, to say the least.  I am thankful to have been given the opportunity to attend an institution like Macalester, but it is time to move on to bigger and better things.  I hope.

I am still looking for that “real-person-job” that will hopefully come my way soon enough, and I am leaving for Germany in a little over a month.  I will be gone two months, but I will be blogging either on here or on a different blog (which I will link to) so expect those updates!  I can’t remember how much I mentioned, but I will be in Neuenhaus, Germany, interning at Kunstverein Grafschaft-Bentheim, a nonprofit art “association” or gallery.  It should be pretty great, and I am excited to see how a different culture handles art gallery business.  Is the language of art universal, or completely different – we shall see!

I’m going to (actually) write a second post all about my senior show pieces, and I will try to do that later this weekend.  I’m moving back in with my parents after graduation, which is wonderful of them since I could never afford my own rent, or only barely.  As much as I want a studio apartment all to myself, it’s just not in the cards yet.

BUT.  In lieu of updating about my seminar pieces, I wanted to spotlight a few of my prints from my printmaking class this semester:

Aquatint – Origins

Sorry that the image isn’t terribly awesome – I took this photo with my phone as a quick snapshot when I first pulled the print.  The theme of the assignment was “Origins,” and I interpreted that in a somewhat interesting fashion.  First of all, the figures are encased in a sprouting bean, and there is a small (backwards… oops) image of the earth inside.  The women inside the bean are meant to represent both fertility and specific goddesses from different cultures, to show how the origins of life are often explained with deities and by citing women in particular.  It’s a lot of symbolism, but I think it turned out pretty cool!

The assignment was intended to show us the technique of aquatinting, which you can see by the varying degrees of shadow in the print.  You sprinkle a layer of crushed resin over the plate, heat it until it melts and adheres, and then immerse the plate in some sort of corrosive solution.  The amount of time the plate is in the solution determines how deep of a shadow is etched into the plate.  It’s actually cool because it looks like such a smooth tone, but actually the shadows are areas of many tiny holes in the plate (wherever the resin ISN’T, the acid can etch).  The longer the etch, the deeper the hole, the more ink that goes in the hole, and the darker the shadow.

Saint-Paul-de-Vence

This was our drypoint print, which I actually made before the aquatint/etching print.  The difference between the techniques is that, with drypoint, you use a sharp metal tool to draw lines into the copper plate, and that’s how you create the image.  With etching, you first cover the copper with asphaltum, which acts to prevent acid from etching the plate, and then draw lines in the asphaltum.  Once you’ve finished drawing, the plate goes into the acid and it only etches in the places you have drawn lines.  You can then proceed with the aquatinting process in order to add shadow.

So here, wherever you see especially dark spots or shading, that is all linework or cross-hatching (no aquatint).  I re-drew a photograph that a classmate took of me during study abroad, while we were visiting the hilltop town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence.  It was such a picturesque town!  I was sitting on the edge of the wall and drawing the hills in front of me, so this is one of those funny conundrum images.  I drew a picture of myself drawing something else!  Haha.  Plus, you know, I’m from Saint Paul so this village was ESPECIALLY near and dear!

Saint Paul Riverfront (From Indian Mounds Park Above Warner Road)

I just pulled this print today!  It turned out great!  But holy moly, it took FOREVER to carve… It’s a linoleum print, so all the white spaces you see here is the linoleum I carved away.  Do you see all the tiny little windows and tree branches?  Yeah, this basically represents hours of my life.  Anyways, I love biking, and my favorite spot to draw is down by the old port of Saint Paul.  This usually means either alongside Warner Road itself, near the train tracks, or up in Indian Mounds Park right above Warner Road.  It’s just really quiet and tranquil, and you get a great removed view of downtown Saint Paul.  Plus, it’s kind of the halfway point between Macalester and Woodbury so it feels like I’m that much closer to home and my family.  It helps when I’m feeling lonely but don’t have the time to go home.  I also just enjoy watching the trains pass by.  I remembered to carve in reverse, too, so it actually looks like Saint Paul and not Saint Paul in a mirror!  Haha.

Alright, that’s all on the updates front for now.  I will try to be more consistent – after all, I need to get serious about presenting my artwork if I ever want to be a professional artist.  And if you know of any job openings for art galleries, nonprofit art centers, artsy visual art stuff in general, art class instructors, etc., let me know!  I have a lot of talent and I want to work with the community in addition to producing my own art.  I’m considering teaching art in school, but I don’t have an education major or teaching credential so it’d be something I’d need to get.  Options = open.

Hello Spring, Hello Last Month of College

Hi everyone!  I meant to be so much better about updating this blog the past few months, but it just did not happen.  And today I will at least partially try to counter that trend by writing something new.  I can’t guarantee that I will become a stellar regular blogger (let’s be real, I probably won’t) but it’s something!

General life updates… I am interning with the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in Saint Paul (a non-profit theatre organization, basically) as the ARTwalk Curatorial Intern.  Every May, the Ordway stages an art show featuring K-12 children’s artwork in the storefronts of businesses in downtown Saint Paul.  So far we have received the artwork – about 530 pieces! – and are preparing them for the show.  In a nutshell, it’s a heck of a lot of work, but I know it’s going to pay off in the end when I see the art in the windows.  I applied for the internship because I wanted to do something more engaging with the community, and nothing encourages children to create art more than seeing their own art on public display.  It’s basically like being famous, after all!  In a time when funding to arts programs in schools is often in serious danger of budget cuts, I want to do everything I can to heighten or preserve youth exposure to the arts.  I only fight for things I believe in, and I really believe in this.  So, yeah, that’s part of what I’ve been doing this semester.

I’ve also spent massive amounts of time working on my senior art honors project.  As a studio art major, we are all expected to create some sort of work (or works) to display in the gallery.  Since we’re also responsible for installing and curating the pieces we create, it’s a nice combination of creative artistic potential and practical gallery experience.  I’ll probably have to do another post with the full details of my project and what it will hopefully turn out to be, but I can at least post a few of the paintings I have done!  I’m focusing on portraits and emotion, and am specifically using my family (mom, dad, two sisters) as subject matter.  Each person gets four portraits done of varying emotion, but I’m not painting on canvas or wood panel like I usually would.  Instead, I paint a thin layer of gesso over drafting-ish paper and paint on that.  It’s actually quite nice!  (Note that this isn’t tracing paper, it’s thicker, and plastic-y so it shouldn’t be completely dissolved by oil paints… although you never really know, think Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper…)  I chose this medium because I wanted the paintings to be see-through when held up to a strong light.  This will all make more sense when I actually talk about my concept, so just bear with me.  : )

Katelyn (i)

Emily (ii)

Emily (i)

Dad (i)

Some of them aren’t finished yet, as I still need to add in a background tone of some sort.  So far, I’ve done almost 6 of the planned 16 paintings – 10 to do this month, wahoo!  It’s going to be crazy, but fun!  I’m intentionally leaving them looking somewhat “unfinished” or “rough” because I want to convey the vast variety of emotions that people experience.

Well, that’s all for today!  Oh, I guess I should mention as a last lead-on intriguing tidbit that I will be going to Germany this summer as part of a fellowship.  I will be working as an intern in a non-profit art gallery/space for a month or two, and I am beyond excited.  Details are still in the works, but I will update when I know more.  That one should at least be more reliable since I’m supposed to keep a journal or blog during my stay, and how convenient that I already have one?  Wunderbar.  I don’t know German, so I’m trying to learn the language… progress is slow, but as long as I know “Ich mag Brot und Kunst” (I like bread and art), I should be good.  Right?  : )

Toodles!

(Water)color My World

After spending the first weeks of my break working on oil paintings, I have finally returned to my other love… watercolors, of course!  If you couldn’t tell from my enthusiastic title.  It had been waaaaay too long, and I was getting sick of oils, so this was the perfect kind of transition.  I’ll start back on the oil paintings within the week, and hopefully with some fresh ideas for my final art project (more on this later, +  pictures).

Two of the watercolors are based off of photos I took while in France – one of the side of Notre Dame cathedral and the other of a field that my class went to paint in during the last two months of the study abroad program.  I have so many incredible photos on my phone and camera that I want to paint… I just have to actually get the ones off my phone and onto the computer.  Soon, I hope!  I’m not even a great photographer.  I lack patience and believe that I can always do one better by making art out of whatever it is that attracts me, but the places I visited were so gorgeous that they speak for themselves despite my amateur photography skills.  : )

Watercolor of the north side of Notre Dame cathedral. Photo taken during February 2012.

Paris was a very gray city last February, so I had to be a little creative in re-imagining what the side of Notre Dame would look like in the sunlight.  And while I’m sure that it never gets quite this colorful, wouldn’t it be great if it did?  It is such an amazing building.  I enjoyed looking at its architecture more than I did the line to get in (thank goodness I went in February, I can’t imagine what the tourists would have looked like in the summer), and it was the only place in Paris that I intentionally visited multiple times.  When you’re only there for five days, you kind of have to strategize!

Anyways, I had a lot of fun painting this.  So.  Many.  Details.  But they make it beautiful.  I’m working on translating all of the many details I always see into successful works of art.  In the past, I believed that my inability to create perfect, realistic, detail was a failure of mine and needed to be remedied.  Now I know that there is a time and place for details – and some paintings just can’t handle all of them.  Art is a journey!

A farmer’s field in Beaurecueil, France, lined with plane trees.

I seriously love this field.  I can’t get enough of Mont Sainte-Victoire or Beaurecueil.  It’s this quaint little village nestled up close to the mountain, and I can only imagine how perfect it would be to wake up and see it from your bedroom window.  There’s nothing like a mountain to make you feel small and part of something larger and more complex.  The photograph I took lent itself well to becoming a painting because of the clear perspective lines (read:  furrows) that helped show the distance.  The mountain isn’t in this painting, but you’ll just have to imagine it looming at you from the left side.  Except it’d be more like peering at you curiously, since Mont Sainte-Victoire is pretty placid and unassuming.  Or at least that’s the impression I got.  : )

I referenced a photograph (not mine) of the Meteora monasteries in Greek, although I altered most of the colors and changed some things around. The female was definitely my touch… haha.

Last one for today!  I recently discovered the amazing Meteora monasteries of Greece.  Wow.  It blows my mind that someone saw the massive rock pillars and thought to build a monastery on the top.  That being said, I would totally live there since I love to observe the world, and the higher you go, the more you see!  I could probably see my house in Minnesota from there.  Or not…

I’m concocting my list of places to travel to, and hopefully one day I can make a watercolor painting of the Meteora while there myself.  I keep memories so much better if I paint or draw what I see, and I am so thankful for being granted the gift of artistry.  Every day.  Strive to cultivate your passions, and don’t live your life with the philosophy that working at something you don’t love today will get you to where you really want to be tomorrow.  You know what?  It might not.  You might not be here tomorrow.  So do what you love today.

Long Absence

A very long, long absence indeed.

When I first created this blog, I really did intend to keep up with it on an at least weekly basis, but of course life managed to get in the way.  There were no updates in part because I hardly created anything this past semester.  I was taking several demanding classes, including Physical Chemistry, and they left no room for anything else.  Don’t get me wrong or call me crazy – I like chemistry!  I thought I would minor in it, and I’m one class away, but I realized that I care too much about my art to do that to myself for another semester.  And so I am returning to you, blog.

Thanks to the wonderful event known as winter break, I’ve been able to catch up and make a lot of art that I am excited to share with you in the coming days.  I don’t have scans or pictures today, but check back in a day or two and I will likely have updated with some awesome pictures.  You can even get a sneak preview of the paintings I’m working on for my senior art show this May, along with my reasoning behind them.  It’s a constantly evolving process, but what isn’t when art is involved?  : )

Thank you for still coming back for me, and this time around I promise to be more consistent.  Deep down, I want the world to see my art.  It makes me sad to think about creating so many wonderful pieces and then having nothing to do with them, no one to show them to.  This way, at least anonymous visitors will benefit from my work.  Have a great evening!

Taylor C

Monday In The Parc (de la Torse)

As of 20 minutes ago, my painting of the Parc de la Torse is done.  Hurray!  It always bothers me when I have unfinished paintings hanging around, even if I don’t feel like actually working on them.  Now I only have one left to complete, so my mind is guilt-free and ready to take on more challenges.  Michael’s is also having a sale on canvases and sketchbooks and OfficeMax sent out its first back-to-school sales ad… I am excited.  On a slightly frustrating note, I left my art pen at work yesterday and need to go to St. Paul to get it soon.  Boo.  At least I remembered it was in my apron and told one of my coworkers to get it out for me before I completely forgot about it!

This was done with traditional oils on canvas board, 20″ x 16″.  I don’t remember the exact date I started it, but it was several weeks ago, and I only picked it up again to finish last Wednesday.  I’m pretty happy with it.  Sometimes I’m surprised at how satisfied I am with the end results of my landscapes, even when they don’t look as naturalistic as the picture.  It’s okay not to have all the details in there, because even as it is there are plenty of them.

Parc de la Torse, Oil on canvas board, 20″ x 16″, July 2012.

On other subjects, I suddenly really wish I were back in France and Switzerland.  I’m pretty sure I could live and paint my entire life in Switzerland and be completely happy because it’s so beautiful there and the combination of the lush green field-plateaus and mountains in the background is just breathtaking.  As I’ve always maintained, I love Minnesota dearly, but we don’t have mountains.  We do, however, have thunderstorms – it should be a testament to my hardcore awesome immune system that I got completely soaked in a storm at 6:45 am on Saturday morning and didn’t get sick.  Lesson learned – don’t bike to work when the weather says scattered showers and there is no good shelter along the riverfront path for over a mile.  Oh well, we all need a little adventure in our lives.  : )

Last mention, I will probably have some of my pieces on display at the Woodbury Dunn Brothers coffee shop in September.  I haven’t finalized all of the details, but I’m thinking I’ll put some of these landscape paintings up and theme it around my time in France.  I’ve never done this before, so I’m nervous, but I think it will all work out.  Happy Monday everyone!

-Taylor

WIPs And A Couple Small Paintings

Oh hey there, guys.  I’m finally updating after a week!  Sorry about that.  To be fair to myself, I don’t usually do a lot of artwork Friday morning-Sunday afternoon because I work weekends and am usually too tired to focus on painting little details or mixing paint when I get home.  But anyways, I finished some stuff.  And made more progress on an older painting (by older I mean about three weeks to a month, fyi) that I’m hoping to finish in the next few days.  I also cleaned the entire first floor this morning, but you probably don’t care about non-art related things so I won’t bore you with the details of my Swiffer adventures.  : )

First, I got bored this week and painted my face, and my hand.  I had a bunch of greenish paint mixed up and left over from something else and decided to “underpaint” my face in green so it didn’t go to waste.  I then painted over it with some mixed skin tones.  Nothing too special, just doing studies.  The green in the hand was added as an afterthought over the top.  This is clearly what I do when I get sick of the Today Show prattling on about relatively meaningless news stories…

No, seriously, this is the most awkward blog picture I’ve ever come across. I’m just that good, I guess.

Well, now that the most awkward part of the post is over, let’s move on.  I finished my super tiny 6″ x 4″ painting of Wisconsin/Minnesota!  It’s a combo because I rode my bike to Hudson one day about a month ago, crossed over the St. Croix River via the I-94 bridge, and sat at this lovely little park in Hudson and sketched in my sketchbook for an hour or so.  Half of the park was underwater because the river was so high, but luckily there was a second tier of benches that weren’t submerged where I could sit down.  It was actually really awesome, and I felt environmentally friendly for not having used my car.  It’s also nice to just get out of Woodbury and go to A DIFFERENT STATE that’s only 12 or so miles away.

After I sketched, I got a Dilly Bar from the DQ a street or two over.  Butterscotch Dilly Bars… amazing.

Oil on canvas panel, 6″ x 4″, July 2012.

Lastly, here’s a WIP (w0rk-in-progress for all you non-artists) of my most recent painting.  I’m pretty sure it’s 20″ x 16″, the standard oil on canvas panel.  It’s a painting of a picture I took in the park near my apartment in Aix, Parc de la Torse.  That park was one of my favorite places in Aix.  I was in it basically every morning and walked through it every day at least once going back and forth to the art studio.  Plus, it was nice to watch it change over the four months I spent in France – it was pretty enough in February, but by the time May rolled around it was gorgeous.

Oil on canvas panel, 20″ x 16″, July 2012.

Alright, time to be productive and paint something.  It’s Thursday, you know?  Happy Thursday!

-Taylor

Sainte-Victoire Du Tholonet

Done!  I really put the pedal to the metal this time since I finished this in less than two days, something unheard of for me and my pace of a turtle.  This one, I really love.  When I look at it, I can feel myself going back to France and standing in the middle of the road, how I was when I took the picture.  That’s what I meant in my last post about what making a successful work of art feels like.  I wish you all had the same connection I do with the motif of Sainte-Victoire, but I hope that even though it’s just some strange mountain to you it still embodies the grace and beauty that I can see.

I can’t take a perfect photo to save my life, I’m sorry.  I mean, pictures never actually do paintings justice anyways, let’s be real here…

Sainte-Victoire du Tholonet, aqua oil on canvas, July 2012.

What I Learned From Marchutz

As some of you may know, I spent the past four months studying abroad in Aix-en-Provence, France.  I count myself extremely fortunate to have been able to live out such an incredible experience, but undoubtedly the most lasting impact of that sojourn concerns my art.  The Marchutz School of Art was founded by an artist named Leo Marchutz, whose history involves leaving the increasingly unwelcome atmosphere in 1920′s Germany and finding himself in Aix, Paul Cézanne’s storied homeland and the motif of his treasured paintings.  As Cézanne found endless inspiration in the local mountain, Mont Sainte-Victoire, Marchutz grew to love Aix and made it his home.  Although he is no longer with us, he continues to pass on his joy to other aspiring art students through the school, currently run by two former students of Marchutz, Alan Roberts and John Gasparach.  And, seriously, these two are amazing.  I can’t honestly put into words how much I grew through their help and guidance.

When I first came to France, I wanted to learn how to make my pictures feel more cohesive, more “whole”.  I skirted the issue for a while because we did many portrait studies, and since I’m a relatively slow painter, I told myself that it was fine that I was focusing on the model’s face and letting the rest of the composition fall by the wayside.  I mean, I would have done it if I had time, but I thought that if I couldn’t whip out a finished full composition in the hour it would be better to at least have part of it look done.  In my heart, I knew I was cheating myself a bit, and my professors were occasionally frustrated with my resistance to fully accepting their advice.  This all changed when the landscape unit came around.

Painting a person, you can technically omit the background and still call the painting “finished,” but with the landscape it doesn’t work that way – all or nothing, baby.  The first day we went out, I was excited but found myself frustrated within 20 minutes.  The colors were wrong.  The perspective was off.  It didn’t flow, it didn’t look like what I saw.  What was I doing wrong?  How could I be good at painting people but not at landscapes?  By the third day, I was so frustrated that I literally sat on the ground and ripped my painting into four pieces.  It made me feel better for a minute… then I realized that not only did I feel unaccomplished, but now I didn’t even have a painting for that day of work.

Soon enough, as Alan was making his rounds, he came upon me and wasn’t pleased to hear that my answer for “where’s your painting?” was my embarrassed face and a finger pointing towards the sad pile on the ground.  I felt worse when he looked at it and told me that it was the best painting of a landscape I’d done yet.

What?  Best landscape yet?  I thought he was joking.

So, we had a little chat about my paintings and my frustration, and eventually I stood up, set another piece of gessoed cardboard on my easel, and tried again.  It turned out alright, now that I’d stopped feeling obligated to include every detail.  It’s hard, and I still struggle with it every day, but I’ve learned that the old adage you can’t see the forest for the trees is true.  So true.  The landscape is a beautiful thing precisely because of the interaction between all of the elements within it.  My beginning paintings fell flat when I was only painting objects one at a time, then trying to integrate them all together towards the end.

Now when I paint a landscape, I tell myself it’s okay if things aren’t detailed, if the tree I saw with a billion leaves and branches looks more like a blobby stump with feelers.  Alright, so maybe not as junky looking as what that sounds like, but, as long as I can see the essence of what I originally saw, I’ve succeeded.  Alan told me that the details will come, in time – it just takes determination, hard work, and patience, and I’m already seeing results so I know he wasn’t only telling me a warm lie.  And that’s the advice I pass on to any aspiring artist who finds themselves struggling.  It’s not only applicable to landscapes, and it permeates the core of real artistry.

I should also mention that I was probably the most difficult student in the class in terms of letting go of my past art experience and trying to live in the moment and accept what came in France.  It’s basically just an extension of my personality (I can be inflexible and set in my ways and routines).  Eventually, though, everything worked out and I had a great time.  Great host mother, great friends at Marchutz, great professors – I couldn’t have asked for more.

Okay, you get a reward for reading all that (or for scrolling down the page – it happens to the best of us).  I started a new painting of Sainte-Victoire yesterday, it’s not quite finished but somewhere around 80% done.  I need to wait for this first layer to dry more so I can put in the trees in the foreground.  Plus, I ran out of green so I have to remix some – running out of paint is the bane of my existence because it ALWAYS HAPPENS.  The picture is terrible, but only because my sister was using her camera and I was forced to improvise with Photo Booth.  So, please, ignore the slant.  : )

Duo Aqua Oil on stretched canvas, 18″ x 9″, July 2012.  This is a painting of a picture I took while walking on the Route du Tholonet one day. It’s probably my favorite painting so far, which is appropriate since the Route du Tholonet was my favorite road to run on and be inspired. This location is about two miles away from the edge of Aix, in a space where the forest cleared out a bit and gave a great view of the mountain. Sainte Victoire always looks so soft when I paint it!

Alright, I think that’s enough for today.  I’m pretty sure my next post will be about the finished version of this, as well as doing a mild explanation of my experience with traditional versus water soluble oils.  I just purchased more replacement water soluble oil tubes to extend my amalgamation of art supplies, and I’m hoping they ship fast.  I actually only have an immediate need for the water soluble linseed oil, as I was stupid and accidentally spilled half my bottle in my art classroom last spring.  As we all know from cleaning up the kitchen after sautéeing something, it was a huge mess.  I might have a tablespoon left, if I’m lucky.  Here’s to hoping it lasts 5 days!  Dick Blick, you had better be speedy quick in your standard shipping.  Teaser:  Holbein’s Duo Aqua Oil Paint is truly wonderful and very similar to normal oils, with the benefit of not having to use turpentine to clean up.  It’s like you’re painting with oils, that clean up like acrylics, but don’t look flat and nasty like acrylics do (IMO).  Perfection, I think yes.

Take care, all!

-Taylor

Celebrating History And Also The Resurgence Of My Art Markers

Happy Fourth of July, everyone!  It’s barely 7:00 am and it’s already hot, humid, and raining, so I can already tell it’s going to be an interesting day.  My family is planning on just hanging out at some state park and having a picnic, so I’m hoping it won’t rain all day.  Plus, I feel that rain can’t be all that good for fireworks displays!

After rediscovering my Prismacolor/Copic art marker collection in the past few days, I’ve pretty much fallen in love again.  I feel like they worked better for me back in the day when I drew cartoonish stuff and didn’t really worry about blending colors, but they’re still good!  Blending is the hard part, especially when the colors you’re using aren’t close in tone to each other, and it’s necessary to blend immediately after laying down a color.  This usually results in me dropping one or more uncapped pens onto my shirt, pants, etc.  But it’s worth it.  I have quite a few markers that were hiding around in my room – it’s insane to think about how each Prismacolor cost me probably $2.50 and each Copic more like $5.00 but I still stopped using them three years ago and forgot they even existed.  I didn’t even bring them with me to college.  I like the Copic brush tip way better than the Prismacolor fine end, but they are just so pricey!  Since I can’t be sure how long this interest in them will last (I am notorious for quick art material obsession turnovers), I’m wary of investing a lot of money in them.  We’ll just have to see.

Some pictures from today and yesterday:

Faber-Castell art pens/Copic Sketch art markers on heavy paper, dimensions unknown, July 3rd, 2012.

It’s hard to tell exactly, but what I did was draw a bunch of different “pieces” of her body (head, torso/main body, each leg, and each shoe) and then just set them together to form a “whole” person.  Not so much in the manner of a paper doll, more like a collage.  The idea of collages has just sounded immensely appealing to me lately, so I think that’s where I’m going right now.

I told you I had a bunch of markers.

Oh!  A couple of paintings I forgot to upload earlier:

Photo of my makeshift studio, currently splayed across the living room table.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oil on canvas panel, June 2012. A copy of one of my painting studies iThanks everyone, and enjoy the holiday!

Oil on canvas panel, 4″ x 6″, June 2012. A miniature self-portrait I did of myself just for fun one day (I wasn’t trying to make it look perfect, more of a skin tone/weird facial angle practice).

-Taylor