New Project, Hiking/Trail Riding Journals

With the Unicorn painting finished, and listed on both Etsy and Artfire (and Twittered!), time for my latest functional art project. Small, hand held size hiking or trail riding journals. These journals will be embellished with natural stones or silver on the leather lacing and then a miniature painting on the cover. I think these will be very unique.

My theme is wildlife and landscapes of the southwest. I plan on using stones that are natural to the landscape depicted for the journal decoration. For example, one journal cover will feature the feral mustangs of Nevada, and I will be using natural (as possible) Nevada mined turquoise and silver beads. Reason being, Nevada is well known for it's illustrious turquoise mines and of course the abundant silver mines. I will also make two additional journals, plans are for an Elk looking over the Grand Canyon (copper and silver beads) and a Buffalo (bison) in Yellowstone (still deciding on stones; need to do some more research).

So I have the theme selected, still need to get more reference material together for the miniature paintings. I have cut all the paper out and am ready to start binding the journals. I'm thinking I will bind and bead each journal first, and then get started on each matching painting. My time is now directed on this new project; I'm excited to see how these will turn out in time! I'll keep on with updates every week!

New Painting, Black Unicorn Bust

After the lake painting I was ready for another horse subject. Here is my latest completed project, called "Northern Unicorn". Done in watercolor pencils, 136# watercolor cold press paper, size is 9" x 12". I worked on this painting for weeks, I had a stretch where I was either too tired, out of town, or uninspired to do any progress with it, which accounts for the length of time to get it finished. I'm just not one of these artists that does a painting a day! However, it feels good to call this painting finished.

I had the idea for this painting a while back. Sometime last year, I was looking through reference photos on WetCanvas Reference Library. When I saw this photo of a Friesian horse, a unicorn immediately popped into my head! So I filed it away, bookmarked it for another time! Sometimes a story unfolds in my mind when I see certain photos, and this black, strong, powerful, beautiful horse head somehow made me think of a unicorn in a Celtic forest, forging an adventure in a mystic land.

I worked on some other projects first for a while and then I got to thinking about my unicorn again. And so now it was his turn to come to life from my thoughts to paper. First I gathered some reference prints, close up of that mane and a pic of highlighted light sources:

From here I made a full size sketch using 6b drawing pencil, trying to get the perspective right and practicing my freehand sketching.

For my colors I used my favorite combination for a vibrant black which is ultramarine, pathlo green, and crimson red, with additions of burnt umber or indigo as needed. For highlights I used violets and turquoise, some peach or pink. Background is mostly warm greys, light ochre and sanguine orange, with lots of loose water to push the colors around. The horse is painted with a more controlled application of water on the pigments.

I'm happy he's done, I was ready . I plan on getting this painting, along with two others, listed on my Etsy and Artfire stores. I'll enjoy my Northern Unicorn until he gallops to another admirers home!

Painting Wet, Lake with Boat landscape

Sometimes I try my hand at painting other subjects outside my usual interest (horses, southwest themes). So I decided to stretch my art skills at painting a small fishing boat on a lake. Painting water is very interesting, from what I studied, water is a reflection of the surroundings but yet needs to yield a fluid appearance. To me, like moving shadows, layers of shadows. I found I needed to be in an abstract frame, colors that would flow directly into one another. I decided it would be fun to document this try at painting water as a WIP (work in progress).

Here is the initial sketch, on sketch paper, with a reference photo:

And a close up of the composition sketch:

Now I drew the sketch on to the watercolor paper. First color sketch of darks (indigo) and neutral green, painting size is approx. 10" x 6" on 136# cold press paper:

And the first layer of the landscape colors added, my focus on keeping the highlights blank, pushing more dark and middle ranges:

Next, I'm adding more middle values, filling in the boat and fisherman. I decided I wanted to add some depth to the background. I tried to recess the middle trees as a secondary treeline to imply the lake flows further between the initial treeline. I'm not sure it works splitting the treeline into two parts. Used more greys on the small back treeline.


Now working on the lake highlights. I used more greens and violets to accentuate a warm still quietness for the water. Fishing is supposed to be a relaxing activity!


With all three tonal values in now, (light, middle and dark), I went to work on creating more depth in the water, shadows of the treelines, punching the clouds and sky depth and color.



I continued to go back and forth on adding depth more blue to the water, more blue greens for the treeline water shadows and the fisherman and the boat. I then wanted to add some highlights to the water, adding those special reflective sparkles, making water like a faceted jewel. Finally, I decided that I had to finish, and leave it as is as I felt myself starting to over tweak the painting. And now, the finished painting:


I'm ok with the outcome; I learned a lot, like waterscapes just may not be my thing! But, I can't say that I won't do another water themed painting in the future. Funny thing though, I found myself thinking about all sorts of new horse painting ideas while thinking about painting water!

Homegrown Business Cards

My business cards I had printed quite a while ago from Zazzle have been outdated as far as web addresses so the time is right for new, updated cards. So I decided to give it a go on my own, using my Photoshop Elements program. I did not use a business card template, just used the DVD jacket label option and poke and prodded around until I could figure out what went where! Does that make sense? LOL! Real techie bable here. For the last few weeks I've been working off and on on design, colors, tweaking things here and there. Finally I pretty much decided before I get too caught up in "paralysis of analysis", just go with what I had done! The result is the two card designs here.

I'm also going to experiment with printing the cards on 100# bristol paper and acrylic "canvas" paper. Which of course means then I will have to cut the cards myself. Yea, I can be quite the "do it yourself" person. But I really don't need tons of cards right now, so why not!

I plan on sending out the cards whenever I can, I have a friend who did me a big favor with sending some horsemanship teaching materials she had access to and I will be sending a little thank you gift to her, along with a couple of these cards.

It's fun pretending to be a graphic designer every once in a while!

I'm in Twitter!

OK, I have to admit, all these Internet social networking sites (facebook, myspace, twitter, etc) had always kinda spooked me. I believe in meeting folks with an actual handshake and seeing them smile. However, as I'm trying to build a career as an artist, I read more and more about how online artist get a lot of traffic to their sites with these networking sites. So, I decided to study the areas, try to be careful and savvy, and see what's going to work for me.

So I tried myspace, like over a year ago, got a bunch of spam and porn boogeymen and deleted my account fast! Then a few months ago, I updated my Facebook page which I had forgot I had because I had a friend who used it to send all her emails out on so I had to make one, like almost a year ago. Still didn't get "it", but I was learning. I kept seeing more and more written about Twitter. When I went to the site a couple of months ago, I just didn't understand the concept. But for some reason, this Twitter was so popular, and I kept reading on the Etsy forums about how artist were getting traffic and sales from "twitters". Ok, so I gave it one more try, signed up and then started posting and pretty much "going with traffic flow".

And then it happened, I became hooked on exploring and writing on Twitter. Oh my God, how did this happen? It's a frenzy of info and for some reason I'm getting the hang of it. I've only been on the site for a couple of days and already have over 20 followers and have no idea how these people found me. This is a whole nother world, sheesh, who would have thought! I guess it went easy for me because I just jumped in and really didn't try to figure it out, LOL! I'm already learning to see the "spammers" who follow me and the people who just do nothing but constantly write updates that are only to promote their Etsy shop items. Like any internet social networks, there are the bad apples out there to prey, so I just use my gut feelings and if it "smells fishy" I just ignore the follow request.

Already my shop views from Twitter are up! This networking avenue just might be worth it! Check out the Twitter widget on the blog now.

My RRC Photo is in a Guide!

I have a Flickr account that I put some of my hiking trail pics on, specifically my Red Rock Canyon trail pics. There's not a lot there, just some of the highlights. Well, about a month ago I got an email from Schmap Guide editor indicating that one of my RRC photos was being considered for inclusion in the new Las Vegas activity guide! I thought, COOL! Now, I'm not a photographer by any means but I do try to follow basic composition guidelines just as when I'm putting a painting together.

Today I got the conformation email that the photo that was being considered has been accepted and is now a part of the 2009 Schmap Las Vegas guide, under outdoor activities, hiking. Now, I know it's not a big deal really, like the photo is in Time magazine or something, but I still think it's a nice little thing to have happened!

Schmap Guide has included a widget for me to put here so there's a direct link to that aspect of the guide. Take a look over on the side bar and check it out. My photo credit is labeled "hosslass".

Glad someone enjoys the photos of Red Rock Canyon too!!

Eagle Trio Sketches and Painting

I know I alluded in an earlier post about an eagle themed painting I was going to do. Well, it's finished and made into a beaded bookmark that's available in my Etsy and Artfire shops. I have to say, I'm pretty pleased with how the finished product looks. This post will be about the painting process though, just my thoughts about how this miniature painting came about.

I have in mind for a series of bookmarks of southwest wildlife animals, such as eagles, cougars and bears to start. Eagles and birds of prey have always been a fascinating subject for me so I chose eagles to start. In researching my reference photos, I decided on a collage of three scenes, a young eagle bust, an eagle in flight, and an adult eagle bust. So I had the reference pics chosen and then set out to make tonal drawings and sketches. Since I don't have a lot of experience painting birds, the tonal sketches will help give a better guideline of where to push the dark values, the mid range values and light values. I sketched the eagles freehand from the reference pics as I need a very small size to fit on the bookmark size paper. Sure, I could have manipulated the reference pic copies to a small enough size and then just traced the outline, however, I wanted to work on my artistic skills and chose the long tedious way. And yes, my eraser got a good work out but I learned so much in the process.

The page of sketches:

Compiling this type of composition took some math skills, which I sorely have struggled with all my life (I'm also slightly dyslectic). It took some time to get the balance just right and then all the resizing of the sketches of the birds. I used the eagle eye as the balance reference, draw the eye first and then balance the rest of the bird around the eye. Seemed to me to be the logical choice of where to start! Now what gave me the most grief was getting the beaks curved and positioned just right!! I never knew . So I wound up breaking the beaks down to a series of stacked blocks to give me a better perspective of attaining the three dimensional look. You can see that in the lower right hand bust sketch. My eraser got the most workout here!

Pics of the finished sketches:

Once the sketches and composition was done now onto the actual painting! Doing the sketches gave me a great base to work from and helped me tweak some changes as I was doing the painting. I used mostly Faber Castell watercolor pencils, they have great color and flow with water, and some creata color and derwents brand pencils too. Unfortunately I did not keep notes or pics of my painting process so I don't have them to show here. So that's a project for the next wildlife painting! Here is the finished product with the sketch reference:

This was a wonderful learning process, it may have taken me a while, but when you insists on learning at your own pace, that's what happens!