uncle joe
Originally uploaded by pierrey

I love the use of line in this simple little drawing by Pierrey on flickr.

Typically I am a solitary artist. I work in a room with Christie in the other corner or in my studio with music but little else of the outside world. Today I broke that habit and traveled to Salem Common for an art date with my friend Jane McDonnell.

It was good to stretch my artistic wings and work in proximity to another artist, even if we did spend a good amount of time chatting. Though in our defense a good part of the time was spent talking about art, not just griping about work!

I painted some quick watercolors, we got some great coffee and did a lot of chatting about art. One of the main topics that came up was how to get into an art habit. I think this is an especially difficult thing for those of us who work a 40 hour a week job (in some cases more hours) and need to do that to make ends meet. When art goes from your full time job to your part time job I think it’s harder to stay in the art habit. That is making art on a regular basis becomes harder and easier to give up. I think that when you take art as a process and remove it from the ability to finish a given work in a regular amount of time to suddenly doubling your process time, it’s easy to get discouraged.

When you get discouraged it’s easy to give up.

How do you fight off discouragement? How do you keep the art habit living?

For me it’s always been about the visual journal- my sketchbook, idea book aka my art journal. It’s a simple thing but I look at my art journal daily, even if I’m not making art that day I look at the journal, flip through the pages and look at the art. Sometimes it’s as simple as looking right before bed and sometimes it’s more elaborate and I grab a couple of older books and flip through them in the afternoon with a good cup of tea. The art journal/visual sketchbook etc is a repository of information. It’s a goldmine of my thoughts.

After years of inactivity I gave myself the task to loosen up. I made a 3×5 inch journal with pages from a national geographic. I gesso’d every page and worked fast and loose, filling a page every night for a couple of month. Whatever came to mind, I journaled.  That was last summer. It set me off onto an art habit that has lasted until now. I had always art journaled previously but never to the extent that I started that summer.

I guess the real question is this: How do you go about making yourself get into your art habit? What do you need to make art everyday? For me I needed to loosen up and make art that didn’t matter to me, I need a journal that was pretty worthless and to work fast. Look at what is holding you back, identify it and eradicate it.

This AM I have a art date with my friend Jane Mcdonald. She’s a fab lady and one I don’t get to see nearly enough. We’re going to sit in the Salem Common surrounded by the long history of the place and sketch. Perhaps we’ll walk about historic Salem and sketch some more. Who knows where the day will lead.

We’re planning on lunch someplace and some discussion on art, the internet, how to keep the art habit alive and self promotion. It should be an altogether fabulous day.

I decided to go with my watercolors for today. I have my little sets and a couple of sketchbooks. I'm also bringing an assortment of drawing supplies.

I'll be sure to tell you ALL about it when I get back home.

roseburg from the mountains
Originally uploaded by petescully

Ipost a lot of stuff from petescully via flickr on here. there's a reason for it. I love his easy use of link and control of color. Thisis a fantastic example of his work, head on over to flickr and check out his ENTIRe stream, great stuff.

My usual method of listening to music is to down load 2 or 3 albums and toss them into a mix on iTunes and hit “random” and “repeat.” I then let this play until I get bored. Finding boredom with music can take up to a month or 2, less so for Christie. I’ve been told that my music listening habit is annoying and boring. I’ve tried to liven it up by creating a larger playlist but for an ADHD music listener like Christie even 6 albums on constant rotation is akin to torture.

My recent addiction is to Telekinesis. They have a new ep out called Parallel Seismic Conspiracies with a fun song on it called “Dirty Thing.” With surf music like beats and twanging guitars and lyrics that speak of broken hearts it’s a perfect end of summer song. I’ve been addicted to them for some time and on this ep they have a new version of their song “Calling all the Doctors” and it’s a humming guitar and snappy beat filled song with smart lyrics. One particular lyric “replace my heart with a machine” has been sticking with me for a few weeks. It’s one of those lyrics that as I think about it imagines appear in my mind. It’s a great thing when it occurs and goes away. Because I’ve been listening to telekinesis on constant rotation the last few weeks the images have stuck. So I decided to get it out of my head and onto paper.

I started with a rough idea in my weight weenie journal and layered on some bright watercolors.

I wanted the replacement machine to look less heart like and more machine like, so I added more blues and grays in the next image. I also changed the position of the head.

I got talking to my buddy and coworker Anthony Ciampa about my idea and how I wanted the heart to look like a more traditional symbolic heart and the heart in the cavity to look more realistic heart but still with a break. He made the suggestion that I have the heart hanging out of the cavity by “strings.” I thought it was a lovely idea and set about to do that.  

I’m still deciding if I want to do this piece on paper, canvas or board. But I’ve started a much larger acrylic piece (6x12in) and really like how acrylic really brings the idea to life. I think a few layers of glaze here and there will really make this image exactly what I’m looking for. Below the image is far from finished.

musicians at the farmers market
Originally uploaded by petescully

Another PeteScully winner. Love the simplicity of this one.

I come from a long line of craftspeople and you wouldn’t believe but musicians. The most identifiable part of my heritage is German and Swiss. Both my great grandparents hailed from Germany and came to the states very young with large amounts of their extended family, apparently because this is how it was done. My Great Grandfather, in addition to working for the Buffalo Grain Company for something like 50 years, was a decorative wrought iron worker, you know the black metal gates and things you find all over the place with curly-qs and ornamentation. There is a subset of blacksmithing where you create ornamentation that looks like such things as grape leaves and grapes as well as other items from nature. I’m sure these initially occurred because some dude somewhere wanted to show off his skills but it became in and of itself a true art form. I’m sad to say that the craft my great grandfather excelled in is dying. Much like the Micmac* basket making (a whole other subset of my mutt-like heritage) it’s going the way of the dodo. I suspect this is true because both of these crafts require hours of labor at their respective benches and years of skill building exercises to learn the skills needed to turn something flat into a hollow wrought iron ball.

Because my Great Grandfather worked for a large company little of his work is something that we still have in the family. There is a banded box, containing shot glasses and a “keg” for liquors, some shelf ornamentation that he created for my grandparents when they bought “the farm,” and several shelves at my great Grandmother’s home. One is spectacular and a showcase of his work, and I’m sure he was proud of it. It stands about 8 inches high and about 8 inches wide, he shelf reaches out from the wall about 4 inches. The base is dark black iron formed into hanging grapes and rippled leaves. The shelf is gorgeous in its ornate delicacy. At nearly 70 years old it looks exactly as it did when it was first made, a tribute to its fine craftsmanship. Someday I’ll get a picture of it and post it here. It’s one of those things that goes unnoticed when visiting family.

Continue reading →

The first couple of weeks of any online class are usually filled with minor but annoying tech issues. This class seems to be no exception. I was unable to find the first week’s video anywhere, and then redid it, only to find the original video hidden in the edit video section of UStream. Then I had what seemed to be a calm week with the tech. I figured that I’d worked out the kinks and things would be smoothing sailing from here on out. I apparently thought too soon.

I received a DM on twitter from a wonderful honest person who told me my private classes as soon as they were saved were appearing for all to see on UStream. This is not something I would be able to see as I’m signed in. I signed out and sure enough there they were. Frustrated and angry I started looking at other sites. I signed up and checked out and tested about 15 different sites. One had the capability to go private, if I paid them $350 per month. Another wanted $25 a quarter (doable) but the videos only stayed on line for 6 days and there was no way to download them. MY frustration built up until I was at a fever pitch. Frankly the LIVE video portion of UStream with the chat is exactly what I need for my classes. It MAKES the class what it is. It allows me to toss information out, students to “raise their hands” and question me in real time. It’s damn near perfect.*

So as my carriage was about to turn into a pumpkin the simplest solution hit me in the forehead. In my panic I completely looked past my blip.tv account. I ran my last class in hi def video in 10 min 2 gig chunks of video. I pay for an account to keep it private. The simple solution: After my show I mark the archived shows as “private” then download the .flv file to my computer and then turn around and load it to blip. Sure it takes TIME but that I’ve got, sort of, but it’s also a secure and easy things to do. Because it’s in an .flv file I can load it up with no quality changes. Blip doesn’t have to process it anymore, .flv is what it broadcasts.

I can’t believe I didn’t think of the simple solution first. Panic, it makes the head cloudy.

Continue reading →

Hand Art Therapy 8/18/10 :: Close Up
Originally uploaded by In My Head Studios

I love these doodles.

For the last week or so I’ve been busy. The DayJob has demanded more than it’s usual 40 hours per week, AJ Ning has required an untold amount of time (read the rules please,) and I’ve just started up a class. All these things, sans the DayJob, are all things that I love and have necessary and needed bits of required attention but I don’t always suspect the shear amount of time that they will require. IN this case, AJ Ning has required an extraordinary amount of attention these past few days, in that a lot of people simply aren’t reading the rules, and then I (or one of my fabulous mods) have to fix the issue and send an email of “uh, so, you messed up, we’ve fixed it but please don’t do it again.  Then I’ve got the class and it’s required and expected amount of work. Add to that pile of stuff to do the DayJob’s extra stuff and then pile on some severe allergy issues and you got the makings for a week from hell.

Don’t get me wrong, I love AJ Ning and my class but last week, due to mostly the extra coming from the DayJob and my allergies, I felt a tad overwhelmed. I was also super irritated by my screwing up the recording of my class. Seriously it was a pisser, especially when the class went so damn well.

So this weekend I slept in and caught up on some MUCH needed rest and hit the 3 canvases I’ve got rotating through my easel. I’ve finished 2 of the 3 plus a board. I then did my thing and added another canvas to the mix and really look forward to watching that canvas develop over time.

IN addition to the all the other stuff I’ve been working on I’ve realized I’m going to need to invest in a new camera- either a new SX#IS series or a for real DSLR. *grumble* I’ve also learned that to do some of the stuff I want to do I’m probably going to need to invest in either a mac or a better laptop and a terabyte hard drive.  Every single video I’ve done takes up massive amounts of hard drive space. Not to mention that all the photos I’m taking for my new redbubble account are freaking massive. As well as the stuff I’m taking for the classes, it’s all big stuff that gets smaller the more I work on it. My 250g external is nearly full as is the 250 gigs on my laptop. I’ve got another 80g external to use but a terabyte will be needed in the future. I have about 7 years of bookbinding photos, articles, art and videos stored up in there. I suppose that the 500g of stuff I’ve got stored up isn’t bad considering its 7 years work.

Back to the canvas. Having not painted in nearly a week, it was good to look upon my 3 canvases and board with fresher eyes. Eyes not irritated by hours of work but eyes adjusted to regular life and looking upon each canvas as a puzzle. Pieces fell into place, a layer of glaze here, a layer of this color there, some thinned white here, etc. That went on until 2 of those canvases were finished. I’ve still got a big puzzle piece going but it’s manageable.

Painting, it makes you feel good.