During one of my last few videos I mentioned thumbnail sketches and how they are useful for developing a final art piece. Today I went to the beach and since my knee is still in a brace and I am hobbling around* I decided to park my butt on a beach blanket** and make some thumbnails.

I decided to do several different types of thumbnails or studies:

Notan– A thumbnail that ONLY looks at black and white. That is the darkest darks of the scene. You can sketch all the darker areas in black if you want.Not the greatest Notan ever, but got an idea of the bands of dark and where the lightest lights are.I added a few too many details for this to be a true Notan thumbnail.

Value– These have a range of shades of gray PLUS black and white. Value thumbnails can also be done larger in what is called a study.I used dark and light green to get different lights and darks.

Color– a color thumbnail looks at a range of colors in the scene. It may or may not take value and tones into consideration. These can also be done as a study. This color study captures some of the colors here.

It is important to differentiate between a thumbnail and a study. A thumbnail should be small, not much larger and 2 or 3 inches on the longest edge. While a study may be much larger. Some folx who work very large might make several larger studies at 8×10 inches or even larger. A study is almost always smaller than the final piece.This is a mixed media color study. 

It is important to make your thumbnails and studies in the same aspect ratio as the final piece. I have had several images that I’ve created the thumbnail and sketches in a 3×4 ration while I’ve ended up making the piece closer to 2×3 or 1×1. The image never quite works properly when I try to translate the image from one ratio to another. It can be done but I like to keep those ratios close to the final piece.

Materials used in these:

• Blackwing Pencil and Muji 2mm Clutch Pencil
• Black water soluble gel crayon
• Various watercolor boxes
• Colored pencils
• Chalk Pencils
• Neocolor1
• Sketchbook
• Pochade Box
• Watercolor postcards

A few things I realized here- I’m sticking to attempting to capture “real” landscape colors which is not my favorite. I really need to get back to “my” color sense when it comes to landscapes. I like the mixed media the most on cold pressed and rough watercolor paper.

The thumbnails are especially helpful when I am not sticking to fully depicting reality. They help me organize what is there to something more interesting on the page.

Thumbnails– help me explore the scene and start figuring out the composition in a quick way that doesn’t waste a lot of paper. To me, it is thinking on paper. These are done on cheap paper because I make a lot of them. I fit 4 to a page but I might make 8 or 12 of them before I find a composition I like.

Studies– solidify that thinking into what might be what the final piece looks like but might be discarded. They further evolve the value and colors and composition of the piece. The color and value interact to move the eye around the image. When I make a study I can decide if I want to go further with the image or not.

I’m talking about these in the sense of a painting but I use a similar set of thumbnails and studies when I’m making prints. Especially if I’m doing layers of color. So even though I’m discussing painting I’m using painting as a general fill in for other forms of art making.

*I screwed up my knee on a eBoard that wasn’t even turned on. I’m feeling a lot better. Range of motion is better but still painful and stiff. I’m several weeks out from riding my bike and will likely need to wear a brace for the rest of the summer. I have a referral with an orthopedist at the sports med place associated with my DR office.

**It’s really a polyester tarp IMO. There are dozens of these sorts of super lightweight tarps all over Amazon sold as “beach blankets.” But when you get them they are polyester tarps. This is the one we were using today and I liked it well enough. This is the one I keep in my bike bag when I’m on longer rides and know I’ll be stopping for a snack or coffee outside.

We had severe thunderstorm warnings for my area last Sunday. I had been getting the alerts on my weather app for the whole day. We felt the wind pick up and my phone started to buzz with warning about wind and lightening. I ran around the house closing windows and was closing the window on the street side of our kitchen when I saw the wind start to change.

The wind started to rip branches off the tree in front of our house and they started to swirl upward. I quickly closed the window and told my wife we needed to get into the basement. We were headed down when we heard a loud bang.

After the bang the noise of the wind changed and when I looked out it was pouring rain straight down and the wind had all but stopped. And the tree in front of our house was on the sidewalk.

Several things happened all at once- a window shade snapped up, four sections of the neighbor’s fence exploded outward, the other neighbor’s porch was pulled away from their house, a metal barrel was blown into our old car, and the tree fell. All this when tornado force winds howled. It was a cacophony of destruction.

We were lucky. The tree fell away from the car. It missed the power, cable, and phone lines to the house and it didn’t touch the street lines either. Our roof is fine, as is our chimney. Our porch is still attached to the house.

The wind pulled some of the aluminum capping away from the trim. I think a section of fence his the new car because there is a small dent on the rear driver’s side door. There was a scuff that wiped off on the passenger’s side door from a trash barrel that blew up my driveway.

​On one side of us, one neighbor lost 4 sections of fence. On the other side their roof is trash, their 2nd floor porch ripped away from their house and has to be rebuilt, and one person lost their car though many more were dented and damaged. One house was damaged by a tree falling into it.

There’s a section of my regular bike route where trees are broken in half and others are just gone.

That said the morning after the city had removed the tree and by the time I returned from work they had cleaned up and patched the sidewalk.

A few days later whatever is left of the Weather Service confirmed that we’d had a microburst event

​The story in 3 images:

I have an art post but have been preoccupied with this and a few other things, mostly the DayJob.

During my last foraging walk on the beach I found a large chunk of what I thought was a nice brown rock, I am always looking for brown rocks. Burnt umber is one of my favorite colors. It turns out the brown rock was a chunk of steel coated in a thick rocky coating of rust and sand.

Awesome. I collected it.

I washed it clean of surface sand and salt.

Then I smashed it with a hammer to roughly coffee bean sized.

Very satisfying.

Of course I did not take a single picture of any of these steps, though I did accidentally take a picture of the rust blob through a rock identification app.

​From the hammer smashing part I then followed the same steps as brick- it got run through 2 steps of coffee grinder- one at french press size and again at espresso size.

I ended up having to let the french press sized particles dry on a plate for a few hours. When the rock is too damp it binds up the grinder- even when I use a drill to expedite the process.

I process my rocks damp to cut down on dust, but there is a fine line for too little and too much water.

My pigment isn’t dry yet, but the yield was pretty low especially when compared to brick. But then I think everything will pale in comparison to the yield of brick. The color so far is a nice deep brown.

Carbon black paints deserve posts of their own so I’m writing a post with some details. I read an artist bloviating that lamp black is an inferior black for ink and paint, and honestly I couldn’t disagree more.

I’m starting this off by writing about lamp black. If you are familiar with sumi or India ink you are familiar with lamp black.

You create lamp black pigment by creating some sort of smokey incomplete burn of a burnable material. That black soot you get on the bottom of your pans when camping? Technically lamp black. I’ve seen a variety of videos on making lamp black- one guy makes it with fat wood he orders online. Most folx use an oil lamp.

I make mine with a simple oil lamp using strained used cooking oil. My lamp is made of a glass jar with a tiki torch wick held in place with some titanium bar stock I had on hand. The wick needs to be held in place and this can be achieved with any sort of metal wire. It needs to hold the wick in place while not pinching the wick. If the wire pinches the wick too much it will starve the flame and the flame will attempt to jump below the pinch point creating a possibly fire hazard.

Anyway, you want to create a sooty incomplete burn so you want to make sure that the wick is technically too long. Mine is about an inch too high.

In my glass jar I put used cooking oil. We collect our cooking oil in an old can for disposal and I took some of this oil, strained out chunks of food and water and poured it into my jar. The wick starts to pull the oil up quickly. I let mine sit for about a half hour to get it fully saturated. While this was happening I found a few supports to hold a metal bowl over the flame. The flame needs to hit the bowl to gather the soot.

Then you wait. The bowl should be turned periodically so that the metal doesn’t overheat. If the metal gets too hot, the soot won’t stick. I burned about an ounce of oil and collected a teaspoon or two of lamp black. It is best to make lamp black outside in an area protected from wind but is also well ventilated.

The lamp black scrapes off the pan with an old business card or clothing tag pretty easily. I scraped mine into the middle of my pan and then dumped it on my glass mulling surface. In order to get it to stop blowing everywhere I attempted to spray it with water. The spray shot soot everywhere. What a mess.

The lamp black is slightly greasy and the particle sizes are extremely fine. They clump together to form tiny lightweight little floating pieces that leave a greasy mark where ever they land.

Lamp black (and in my experiments all types of carbon black) requires the use of a degreaser for it to mull properly. I used rubbing (isopropyl) alcohol, but I’ve read about folx using vodka. I suspect that soap would work as a rewetting agent as well as a degreaser for proper incorporation. I used a smaller amount of watercolor medium* than usual and ended up adding more and using plenty of water to mull it. Mulling was short and sweet once I added in the alcohol.

I have read that you can reduce the amount of grease/oil in your lamp black by heating the soot up until it glows red hot. I did not find that this reduced the grease/oil when I tried it.

It does not require levigation to remove large particles, there just aren’t any.

Lamp black gives a very low yield of the most delightful deep rich black I’ve seen. From the amount of lamp black I collected, I created 1 half filled full pan of color. It also dries up into near nothingness with cracking. This might be a issue with my particular watercolor medium but I’ve only had issue with cracking with some of the colors I’ve mixed.

It’s hard to describe this lamp black watercolor- it’s deep it’s dark it’s rich and even. It rewets wonderfully and has a lovely flow. It’s that inky black I look for when I think black. It’s a perfect deep dark. 

The downside is that it is SO DAMN messy. The stuff flies all over the place and when it lands and is touched it leaves a greasy dark mark. It requires a spray to get it cleaned up, and good god if you use a rag that has any lamp black on it, you smear it everywhere.

This mulls so easily it’s virtually not needed. Once the degreaser is added it really does mix into the medium with ease. I think I could easily mull directly in my small mortar and pestle. I will say that once it’s on my glass it is such a small particle size that it sinks into the frosted areas and won’t come out easily. I lost a lot of the pigment to the mulling process. Which is why I want to mix directly into my mortar- I will lose far less to the surface area.

Making lamp black isn’t hard but it is a pain in the arse. The real question is if it’s distinct inky black color is worth the mess and for me it is.

*The watercolor medium deserves it’s own post.

I started watching videos about primitive pottery  making years ago. There is something very soothing about watching someone dig up mud, strain and sift it to make a pliable clay, then turning that clay into pottery. I suspect that if I lived in a more rural location I’d have a kiln in my backyard and I’d be raku firing pots.

Instead I live in a city where my mini Solo stove knock off gets the side eye.

The primative pottery making led me to videos about making my own ink and paint from foraged stuff like leaves, fruit, berries, and walnuts as well as rocks.

I started my foray into making my own paint by visiting a beach I love and picking out some softer rocks that I could break with another rock and left marks on harder rocks. I then brought that home and broke them into smaller, coffee bean sized pieces with a sledge hammer.

Very therapeutic. I highly recommend the process.

I then used a variety of means to crush those pieces down into smaller pieces and smaller pieces until they were little more than dust.

I started out with a mortar and pestle. Then used a whirly coffee grinder. Then an old magic bullet blender. I’ve settled into an old manual coffee grinder with a stainless steel conical burr. I attach the manual coffee grinder to a drill and use power to grind the stone to espresso sized dust. I have not tried the coffee grinder with harder rocks, only an ochre. The whirly coffee grinder has been ground DOWN by harder rocks.

This gets dumped into my mortar and pestle for a final pass before the wet portion starts.Upper right are my own pigments. This car is mostly painted with my own rock based pigments!

The next step is levigation. Basically using water and swirling to get the heavier particles out and only the finest particles into a slurry that will then be strained through a coffee filter.

​Levigation removes not only the largest particles but stuff that won’t grind down and contaminants. I end up losing at least half of the ground up rock to levigation.

Anything that gets levigated out ends up back in the mortar and reground with the pestle. I want to get every drop of potential color out of the grind as possible, but I also don’t want to spend days doing it. Honestly, one could go a little wild with the crushing, grinding, and levigating. I’ve decided that I’m going to lose a fair amount of potential pigment no matter what I do.

I’ve made a wide variety of colors of paint from a variety of rocks. Some are very interesting- a pink from a pink rock, some stuff that looks a lot like raw sienna and some stuff that looks a lot like yellow ochre. One of my favorites is from a few chunks of brick I found next to a very old building. It made the most lovely red brown color.

The most recent exploration is into carbon blacks, which I think deserves a post of it’s own. It’s a delightfully messy project where I’ve made lamp black and my own charcoal. I really want to make my own compressed charcoal sticks from sticks and twigs from my own yard and from my various hikes and bike rides.

A word of caution, when grinding down rocks or charcoal or processing lamp black, wear a mask. A good mask too. I’ve been wearing a N95 and feel like I should probably invest in a good respirator. Rocks can contain a whole load of things I don’t want to breath in, but also dust particles of any kind are not great for lungs, so I shall always wear a mask and eye protection.

More pictures soon, I’ve been really bad at taking photos of this process.

I’m stalled on the 300 Vehicles project. I lost steam on it over the last few weeks due to work being pretty nutso. Work has pretty much evened out but I’m still stalled out.

The work issue is compounded by the fact that I still have not heard back from the gallery about getting the gallery space at the end of August. Part of me is wondering,  “Why bother?” The other part of me is looking for alternative locations to show these pieces.

I am also focused on my paint making and pigment hunting. Pure pigment powder from a brick.

Too many interests and not enough time!

Tomorrow I have to attend a graduation pretty early and I suspect that I’ll be one of the first people there. The location of the ceremony is in a neighborhood so I should be able to wander around and do some drawing while I wait.

As much as I’m in a funk and stalled out on this series of images I’m committed to finishing all 300. I’m currently sitting comfortable at 200.

Completing 200 images is an accomplishment, but I really want to finish all 300.

I have the Yart Sale coming up and I kind of want to have the vehicle images at the Yart Sale, see if they sell. But if they do then I won’t have images for the show if I get the gallery spot. A catch-22. Also frustrating.

I talk about balance on my Less is More Healthy vlog often. For much of my life, my life has been out of balance, and it wasn’t until my late 30s that I realized just how out of balance my life really was. I had this moment in my HR office where I was listing a job and I fully realized that I was replaceable. I was a cog in the machine. 

My time with that company was a sunk cost, I could have stayed on, but I knew my position was on the short list for elimination or being efficiencied* into something more stressful and taking up more of my free time.

Anyway, I applied for grad school. The debate back then was, do I go for my MFA and pursue my dream of being a college professor OR do I get my MA in art therapy. At this point you know I chose art therapy.

Anyway, 3 years later, I was applying for jobs, and landing one, and doing the usual post grad school hours churn.

This was not a balanced time in my life.

Anyway, fast forward to now.

I am seeking balance in my life.

Part of that balance is making changes to allow for healthier habits, like eating right for my body, exercise, and making art (which is a good thing for my mental health).

Anyway, part of my change for balance (yet another thing that has evolved from my recent values journaling exercise) is that I walk and try to draw routinely, in my case, nearly every day. I recently completed the 100 Vehicles Challenge, a self imposed challenge to get better at drawing cars and trucks in my en plein air sketching.

Only to find that I actually kind of like drawing vehicles. They tell stories, especially beaten up cars. Or well cared for but older luxury vehicles. What does it say when the Escalade has been keyed down to bare metal and the full length of the passenger’s side?

It’s all a story of some sort. 

Anyway, I’ve been drawing these little vignettes of cars, which seems like a sort of portraiture. We Americans really do identify with our vehicles, don’t we? I kept going with the vehicle drawings. I’ve done 77 of them as of this writing. I’m hoping to get to 300.

Yes 300!

Why 300?

Well, 100 is a challenge or even a class assignment. 300 is a commitment and really over the top. It’s excessive. But also 300 will look really cool in a huge mass on the wall of the gallery.

A local art gallery is doing a pop up in one of their smaller gallery spaces. You put in a pitch, get picked, and pay for the space for a week (it’s a pop up) and then have an art show in a legit gallery. My pitch was for 300 images on their walls. So now I have to make it happen. (I’m going to do 300 of them even if I DON’T get chosen for this space.) Anyway, keep your fingers crossed for me.

Also the art association I’m a member of is doing a spring show and I’m applying to hang 3 of my pieces.

*This is my term for how corporations combine roles to make something more efficient and save money but really puts more stress on the people in that role. Enshitification of a job.

About a month ago I wrote about the results of my values journaling session being that I REALLY want to focus on my making my own art and building an art making practice and being an Artist, capital A.

I had a convo not long after I finished my values journaling and arrived at this conclusion where I made the statement, “I really just want to be an Artist. I want to make art and sell art.”

I know it’s possible to be an Artist (capital A). More than a few of my undergrad classmates and friends I’ve made along the way, are in fact Artists (capital A).

Some have supportive spouses that make good money. Some have made wise choices for themselves. Others have begun their art career later in life. They’ve all made a choice at some point to just be an Artist with a capital A.

I know that many of my friends actually make “a living” as Artists. Some of them make Fine Art, some are illustrators, some do a combination of Fine Art and Illustration and teaching. But they all consider themselves Artists (capital A.)

Until I was older, I was always told that being an artist was not possible. I believed this, despite looking at my various art teachers, who were Artists (capital A) and various people in and around me who made art on the regular. I was told that art wasn’t a real career and that I’d struggle my whole life.

Among many other things.

What a load of horse shit. 

Life is full of struggles. I wonder if I had been encouraged to be an artist if I’d have been happier or struggled more. I look back to that summer where I PAID MY BILLS by making and selling art and I wonder if I had taken that as a clue that with hard work and effort that I could in fact make a living by making art.

Was it easy work? No.

That summer was many early days and long nights of hiking, painting, drawing, photographing and learning how to do this online thing- I learned HTML to do those early eBay postings. I learned how to take photos for online sales. I package my orders and shipped them out. It was a LOT of work.

But I loved every minute of it.

As the kids I mentor and work with tip toe towards graduation, I think about advice I wish I had gotten, support I wish I had gotten. I strive to be a better mentor than I had. I pass along opportunities to the young people I mentor now. I lift up instead of tear down.

Advice I have for young artists just starting out:

Live somewhere affordable. Look for cheap rent, get a roommate. Don’t be pulled into the allure of a high priced city. Build your sales in the low rent place and then move somewhere more expensive later.

Work full time on art. Work part time if possible. If not possible to work part time, work full time in something related to art or creativity. You’ll be tired, but creativity is a muscle that needs stretching. The more you are creative, the more creativity you have. Avoid retail, unless you feel like you need to work on your customer service skills. Retail will kill your creativity (if you are an introvert.) I also think everyone should work retail at some point in their life. Work in some service industry but don’t get trapped in it, unless it works for you and your creativity.

Make art as often as possible. Always carry a sketchbook. Draw and paint whenever you get a chance. Don’t worry about being the weirdo in the meeting with a sketchbook. Be the weirdo. Draw in meetings, but pay attention, don’t draw if you can’t also pay attention. Take notes along with your drawings.

​Start now. I ignored advice from a professor who told me in my second year of college that I should be working toward a show already. His advice was that I should be looking to show my art in coffee shops and small galleries NOW. It goes back to that adage about planting trees, the best time was to plant it 20 years ago, the second best time is now.

Make art and share it. Making art and sharing it is scary. The first time I shared a picture of my art it scared me. It still scares me. I lived through internet trolls and college critiques. It all sucked. But generally, when I have shared my art with other people the reception has been wonderful. People are generally kind and supportive. Share it with friends in real life. Post it to whatever social media you use. Block haters and trolls.

Ask for help. Ask for guidance. Reach out to that professor you liked, or that teacher that you looked up to. Ask them for guidance. Develop a relationship. (Bring them a coffee or tea. Or ask them to meet you for coffee/tea.) Ask them what they think about how to make a career in art. I promise you most creative people you know will help and support you. If they can’t they might put you in contact with someone who can help or guide you.

Thinking of this advice, I am starting now on a body of work, and I know of a gallery that is doing week long pop ups for a low price. I’m going to set aside some money to have a show. You’ll all get an invite.

I had a great Thursday.

Please refer to my previous post wherein I pissed and moaned about how much my Thursdays usually suck.

I started my day off with a meeting, and against my better judgement I brough my sketchbook with me. I also bought my koh-i-noor Versatil magic pencil with me. I didn’t know what the contents of the meeting would be but I knew that the local movers and shakers of the city political world would be in attendance.

We listened to speeches and I decided to do what I do- draw the people around me. I sketched a bunch of people, doing my vibes not realism style and it made my day that much better. Anyway a few images from today:

I can’t remember all the names of all the people, but 7 folx who sat across from me.Lynn, MA mayor Jared Nicholson

Meegan Simpson- Best Director of Elder Services for the City of Lynn

I’m tempted to spend some time at some local political events and sketch people. Many folx sit REALLY still, especially the politicians.