Is it Spring, yet??

Kyle Broflovski, as seen on his 

South Park Wikia page

As they say on South Park, I've learned something today.  

Okay, not just today.

Okay, it's taken me eight years to learn this (sheesh!)

Here's the thing:  I suck at winter.  Yeah, pretty much.  Every single year, my artistic juices dry up, or freeze up, or go south for the season ... I don't know.  Anyway, no portraits get produced from at least December to March.    When I try to paint, it's ... well, it's not pretty.

So, instead of making my wonderful clients, who would no doubt like their commissions in a timely fashion, wait through the dark months with me, I'm starting a new practice.  I'm actually a little excited about it.

I intend to take commissions and work normally through the spring and summer, do my next fall portrait marathon, then shift gears:  no more commissions until I'm good and ready.  In between, I'm going to allow myself to learn, play, grow, experiment, practice, study, waste materials, and possibly (it could happen!), just maybe, produce something worth looking at along the way.

But wait!  That's not all!  I plan to visit animal rescues, refuges, sanctuaries that don't focus on dogs and cats, take a lot of pictures, talk to the staff, meet the animals, and use those encounters and my reactions to them as inspiration for all this experimentation.

Now for the really good part.  If anything gets done that I'm happy enough with not to paint over, burn, or submit to the Museum of Bad Art, I will find some way to sell it, and share the proceeds with the sanctuaries themselves.  So, that's pretty cool, huh?  I'm almost excited for next winter, now.

But not yet.  Right now, I can feel the siren song of Spring calling to my dormant muse.  I can tell things are starting to brighten up not just because the sun is up past 5pm, but because I just now managed to finish my annual Hope for Hounds design, and I pretty much like it!  (You'll see it soon enough.  Don't get pushy!  ;) )

I've spent my semi-conscious winter days seeking inspiration and energy from the gentle glow of my computer screen's offerings, searching out other artists and their work, watching tutorials, reading blogs, browsing image searches, and emailing with my artist friends.  Yesterday, something clicked over in my innards, and I had a wild urge to try something I'd found along the way.  I grabbed a panel that had been ruined with a bad painting, sanded and primed over (not good enough for a commission, but okay for experimenting).  I cast about for a subject, and my eye landed on a snapshot of my first dog, my little poodle Hobie, on the cork board over my painting table.  I grabbed some conte crayon, tossed it aside for a pastel pencil, erased most of that and fine tuned the rest of the drawing with vine charcoal.  It came together so quickly!  Just free-hand; no grids, no reference photoshopped-and-printed-actual-size, just me and the curling snapshot.  Okay, drawing down.  Should I fix it with a fixative or glaze, or just paint on into it, letting the drawing melt into the paint?  Yeah.  That.  A few hours later, I was pretty much done.  To my amazement.

Hobie
8" x 10" acrylic, pastel, vine charcoal on gessoed panel
© Xan Blackburn 2013

(Does he look guilty, or irritated?  He was!  He had this habit of wadding up blankets, and sucking on them, leaving a big wet gooey blanket-teat, and I'm pretty sure that's what he was up to when I snapped the picture.)

I really wanted to keep the brushwork loose, simple, un-refined.  I didn't succeed on that score entirely, but it's a lot looser than I usually work.  Here's a closer look, so maybe you can see what I mean.

Hobie - detail
© Xan Blackburn

I kinda like it.  It was a very liberating experiment I wasn't sure I could even manage, allowing myself to let go of expectations for a "pretty" painting, or even a likeness of Hobie himself.  Since it actually did come out looking pretty well like him (I left out the skin freckles showing through his very short fur), I pronounce myself ready to get back to work.

Whew!!

Keeping it fresh!

See a difference around here?
I just finished my web re-design.  Tell me what you think!  Go take a look at my website and give me some feedback, okay?

Okay, now I can work on Petey some more!

Reminder!  Make sure you're ready to bid on the SEVEN ARTIST Pet Portrait Artist Auction starting on April 20th at 9am Pacific time!

Busy Day!

Fluffy, Work in progress. 8" x 10" acrylic on panel. ©Xan Blackburn 2011

Fluffy's portrait is coming along nicely.  As usual, I was a little afraid of messing it up.  Again.  But just pushed on forward.

The background is looking intriguingly like leather, somehow.  I didn't mean it to, exactly, but I like it.  Fluffy is looking less amorphous, though he does need to stay at least a little amorphous!  Glazing in his soft swirly hair is just the perfect way to control how fuzzy he stays, especially at the edges. 

There's a lot of raw umber and raw sienna, with a bit of white, worked into that background, as well as glazed into the fur.  The play of the warm and cool tones keeps him from becoming a fuzzy ice-sculpture, and unites him with his background.  The white fur would reflect some of whatever color was around him, besides just letting it show through at the frilly edges.  I'm really enjoying his flyaway twists of fur!

This is how we left him last time you saw him. 

Fluffy, earlier. ©Xan Blackburn 2011

Shows up a bit more now, eh?  I can see finishing this up in the next couple days.  I'm pretty sure his owner will be happy to finally have his portrait!


I've been asking for reference photos for my demo portraits, and have received some great ones!  So far, I've got a Berger Picard, a Cardigan Welsh Corgi, and a Miniature Aussie.  I just need one more.  I'd love to do a smooth dog, like a Xolo.  But I'm open to anything on the ICKC breed list, at this point. 

Little NEWS FLASH:
You can now sign up to get my Xan's Art Friends Newsletter, and/or to be on the Commission Alert List by following This Linky.  Some of you are probably already on my list, in which case you'll still be signed up.  But if you're not, and want to get the highlights, it's a good way not to miss the most important stuff (like, sign-ups for Portrait Marathons, upcoming events that might bring me to your area, stuff like that).  I'm trying to get more business-like around here!  The link will stay in my sidebar, up at the top, and in a few places on my website, too.  I have a newsletter all set to go, but I'll give you a day or two to sign up first.

Another Little NEWS FLASH:
Since I've started taking commissions again, I've updated my website with the info, including my price list.  So you can start planning your gift list for the year.  ;)

That's been my day!  Does that seem like a lot or a little?  You wouldn't believe how long it took me to set up my newsletter thingamabob! 

Holy Moley!

Life is change, so they say.  Well then, Xan's Art is alive and kickin'! 

I've spent the last several days, and a good part of the nights, getting my site re-worked.  It needed some freshening up anyway, and I never had gotten around to filling up some of my portfolio pages, but the catalyst for getting it done now was so I could put up a bunch of prints for sale, hopefully to inspire some holiday giving. 

Technology is my frenemy!  :P  I am not code-savvy, my friends.  Nope.  So, I've been using Kompozer to design my sites.  I'm sure there's a lot more it can do than I know how to make it, but all my web design ended up looking clunky, table-y, and static.  Then I tried using the Wordpress blog provided on my domain, after searching for and installing a gallery-friendly theme.  I got that almost done, but the images in the gallery page were all cropped weird, and I was not happy with it at all.  My hubby, H, had iWeb on his Mac, which he used to re-do his own site.  I'd watched over his shoulder jealously, as he set up gallery pages with abandon.  That's what I need, I decided! 

Unfortunately, my Mac is more, shall we say, mature.  His copy of iWeb wouldn't install on my operating system.  So, first I had to upgrade to Leopard.  I nervously went through all that that implies (would everything on my computer be lost?  Why, oh why, do I not do regular back-ups?  How, oh how, is it that I have this many hundreds of gigs of stuff I do not want to lose??), only to find that it still wasn't up-to-date enough.

So then I had to download the latest updates.  Have I mentioned we're a bit out in the boonies?  We have satellite internet here, which is ... just passable, but our bandwidth is limited in a 24 hour period, which I rapidly exceeded.  Actually, I did that just by forwarding my couple years of gmail account to my regular email account on the same day.  That means our internet is slowed to a crawl for the next 24 hours. 

*sigh* 

So, I gave up until about 11pm, after which we are allowed to do large downloads for a few hours by our ISP.  I got the download of the updates started and went to bed, setting the alarm for 3:30am, so I could keep the download from overflowing into our next day's bandwidth, if necessary.  My alarm didn't go off, but the kitties woke me up anyway, so that's alright.  The download was complete, but needed to be installed, so I got that started, saw it was going to take quite awhile, and went to stare out the window for awhile, kneeling backwards on the couch with my chin on the back, hands and feet tucked in for warmth.

That was actually kind of nice.  The moon had recently set, but had left a bit of glow behind, which picked up a wavey serpent of mist in the meadow by the pond.  It looked a bit like Nessie's ghost, and I watched as the wind caused it to undulate slowly. 

I checked back, and saw the installation was going to take way too long, so I went back to bed.  A couple hours later, I was able to re-start the computer, and install iWeb, which also took a few hours! 

Finally, I was able to start working on my site.  Only to find that, typical of Mac software, it looks slick, but there's only so much you're allowed to get in and mess with the way things look or work.  In other words, I couldn't make a sales page out of the fancy gallery pages.  I had to jimmy together a separate sales page with a good ol' fashioned table inserted as an "html snippet". 

Oh well.  It works.  And, it does look much slicker!  Go take a look and tell me what you think!

I'm going to bed.  It's now 2:30am.