3rd week of Painting Blogs. Merry Christmas!!!

Painting of the week at the Dizzybear Creations Webstore

Only 3 days to go... Merry Christmas everyone! Hope you all have a very festive and joyous Holiday Season!

As part of my ongoing series of blogs about my older paintings, before releasing the new paintings in March, today I'll be writing about "Las Senoritas", my second of the original series of Day of the Dead (dia de los muertos) paintings, painted back in 2007, and "The Pirate", painted in 2012.

I quickly mentioned "Las Senoritas" in my first blog about how I started painting, and how I learned how to do so in a two week period, due to a friend having confused me with someone else. You can read that blog by clicking here. There's a LOT more about this particular painting within this blog though. 

Las Senoritas

"Las Senoritas" was my favorite of the original paintings to paint during that two week period. It challenged me at every turn and made me want to quit several times. Fixing every mistake I made, seemed to improve the painting, but every fix seemed to ruin something else. I was trying out all sorts of methods of painting that I had read about, so there was a lot of trial and error, mostly error.  It ended up surprising me how well it turned out. Which made me fairly upset when it was destroyed.

I initially started painting "Las Senoritas" in oil. The mariachi man and the background were both painted in oil.  I finished this part of the painting late one night, planning to continue after a little sleep. Being the first time I had ever worked in oils, I had no idea how long oil paints took to dry. I set up a fan to blow on the canvas before I went to bed, expecting it to dry the painting, or at least enough to be able to resume painting the next day.  It didn't.  I went ahead and tried to continue painting, since time was limited, but quickly discovered that the background paint was mixing in with the new paint, and muddying the colors.  I decided to give it another day to dry, and worked on some photography pieces for the show at my friend's restaurant, and built some frames, leaving the fan blowing on the painting.

The next day, it was still too wet to paint on, but I had an idea. I had a fish tank at the time that had seascape illustrations on the front of the tank, pieces of glass that stood up inside the tank with more illustrations on them, and the backside of the the tank was one large image. It was basically a layered, miniature stage set, for my goldfish. Looking at it gave me the idea that I could paint the senoritas on glass, and then set the painted glass in front of the oil painted background. I painted the senoritas with acrylic paints, as I discovered that I had no patience for how long oil paints take to dry. None at all.  I even use a hair dryer to speed up the drying when I paint with acrylics, which dry pretty quick on their own.

When I finished painting the Senoritas, I set the canvas with the oil painted background down on a table top. Using legos I made little supports about a half inch taller than the canvas to set all around the outside of the canvas, and placed the very thin glass I had painted the Senoritas on, on top of the legos, so the canvas with the wet oil paints, wouldn't touch the backside of the glass. I set up a camera above all this and photographed the painted glass, with the oil painted canvas behind, adjusting the lighting to keep the glare off the glass. While adjusting the lighting, I noticed that if a little bit of light got under the glass, it gave the Senoritas a little bit of an ethereal glow, so I positioned a little keychain light to shine up under the glass, behind the Senoritas. 

After photographing it, there was a bit of a mishap and some of the lamps I was using to light everything with fell onto the glass, shattering it, cutting the canvas beneath it in many different places, and smearing the paint in many other spots as well. Needless to say, I was beyond pissed off. I wanted to call my friend with the restaurant right in that moment and tell her that I wasn't going to be able to do the show. I calmed down after a while, cleaned up the mess by putting all the pieces into a box, and then proceeded to look at the photos I had taken of the painting on the computer. 

I had taken several hundred pictures of the painting, with many different settings, and different lighting options. My camera wasn't the best camera for this kind of work. It was more a cheap, point and shoot with a few manual modes. Most of the pictures were awful: blurry, not well lit, glare from the lights on the glass, but mostly unusuable.  There was only one photo that managed to focus and not have lighting glare.  That picture, with a little digital work, resulted in the print that is available today.  

A couple of weeks later I looked at the destroyed painting, and decided that the glass shards were mostly too small to try and put it back together like a puzzle, and the canvas was all but destroyed, so I ended up throwing it all away, and have never used oil paints again.

Even with the mishap, and all the stress of making it all come together, "Las Senoritas" remains one of my favorite paintings, mostly because it was so challenging, and forced me to try, and to learn how to do new things.  Even the digital work was new to me.   I had played with photoshop previously to alter photographs, but with this painting I had to learn how to digitally paint to fix a few areas that didn’t photograph as well as I would have liked.  This painting seems to be a favorite among the prints I sell as well, as I get notes asking me about it fairly often. Like this one:

"Hi!! I bought several of your pieces while I was in Sedona in January and I love them. I have a question for you. I purchased one that looks a little different than the others. It has an angel in a pink dress and one in a yellow dress and unlike your other prints they don't have the little white highlights in their eye sockets. Is it an earlier work? Is there a significance to it??"

My reply (with a couple of edits): ((The first paragraph is a pretty good summary of a large portion of my first blog))

That is "Las Senoritas" and is one of my first paintings. It's a fun story actually that I should probably start putting on the backsides of the prints of the first paintings. Just real quickly, about 7 years ago, I only made jewelry, gift items, and windchimes (you may have seen them at Sedona Green, as about 60% of the items in that gallery are made by me). A friend of mine in Jerome owned a restaurant and she asked me to be their "artist of the month". I agreed, thinking she knew what I made. She asked me three weeks prior to the art night, so I started making extra pieces and figured I'd be setting up a table on the night of the art walk. A week later she called me, and asked when I would be coming in to hang my artwork. I said "hang? What artwork were you wanting me to bring?" and she said "you know, your paintings and photography." I played dumb a bit, and we decided upon the day before the art night. I then set out to teach myself how to paint and painted for a solid two weeks, barely any sleep, and discovered I was kind of a natural at it. The pieces were so popular, that the restaurant kept me on for 3 months, since I was the first artist to ever sell anything off the walls. 

I've done two more series of Day of the Dead paintings so far, and in each of them, the style has been different. The first series, I referred to paper mache dolls while painting. Between me still learning to paint, and the dolls themselves, the style was more primitive. Beginning with the second series, I again worked with figurines to refer to, that were much more refined in construction, so the paintings themselves became more refined in style, as I was doing my best to paint in a realistic (photo-realistic) still life manner. After finishing the first four paintings in this series, I felt as if there was just something missing, and decided I wanted the skeletons to have a little "spark" of life, so I went back and put the little sparkle in the eyes, and have ever since. No one has ever asked me that before, I appreciate the interest! Thank you :-)

 The second painting being featured this week is “The Pirate”. This is the third painting I did in the series of 16 paintings painted in 2012. Unlike the first two series of paintings, I didn't use Day of the Dead figurines as reference for these paintings, which really gave me a lot of freedom in how the paintings progressed, relying on my imagination. Not having something sitting in front of me to look at, and to paint like a still life though, had a set of problems in itself. Mostly in understanding light and shadows. Michel was really amazing in helping me with that, he has a really good eye for light and spacial relations (and should start painting himself).

I can be pretty stubborn at times, so I wasn't the best at hearing him tell me what he felt was wrong about the paintings. I was even a little insulted at first, as he had a lot to say on the first couple of paintings. A LOT.  He was pretty good in pointing out what he did like, but the list of what he didn't was definitely longer, especially on the first four or five paintings of 2012.

After hearing what he said, I put that first painting away for a few days, and when I looked at it next, I realized the thoughts he had on how to make my painting better were actually really good ideas and I started making some of the changes he suggested. The painting did get better. Which made me a little mad, both because he was right, and that I didn't see it myself, which ended up making me laugh for having gotten mad. It happened pretty much like this on the next couple of paintings too. It's funny how much the ego can get caught up in something.

Michel & I at the Day of the Dead procession in Tucson, AZ

Michel & I at the Grand Canyon in Arizona

 I still have Michel tear my paintings apart, or try to anyways. I've gotten a lot better at stepping back and looking at the paintings with him in mind, so I can fix things he would notice before showing the new paintings to him, since I dont really let him see the paintings until right before I finish them.

As I mentioned in last week's blog: "The Pirate" and "The Mermaid" actually started out as one painting. I decided to split the one painting, into two paintings because I did not like how small the characters had to be to all fit into one painting. 

The Pirate 8x10

The Pirate 5x7

Originally, I planned to have the Pirate on board a pirate ship, and one lone tentacle coming up behind him, preparing to grab him. It didn’t look ominous enough to me though, so I added more tentacles; however, the sea creature then looked more like it was hugging the ship, rather than preparing to pull the ship and the pirate to a deep, watery grave. Solution: Start over, yet again. This time, I painted a small

The Pirate, matted to fit an 11x14 frame

pirate boat in the distance (as in the original Mermaid picture, see previous blog) & placed my pirate in a rowboat. My favorite parts are the little tiny people jumping off the boat in the background and the look on the pirate's face. 

Prints of all the paintings shown here in this blog are available at the webstore. 
"Las Senoritas" is available as a series of specially reprinted, limited edition, hand signed and numbered prints. Limited to a series of only 10.  

You can see the other limited edition prints by clicking here or visiting http://dizzybearcreations.storenvy.com and clicking on the "Special Edition Prints" link on the left hand side.

"The Pirate" is available in 3 different sizes at the Dizzybear Creations webstore.

Two more paintings next week! Thank you again for sharing my artwork/posts with friends that you think would like my artwork, on your social media accounts: Facebook, twitter, blogger, pinterest, tumblr.... 

 It is INCREDIBLY helpful in getting my artwork out in the world, and is greatly appreciated.

Merry Christmas from Dizzybear Creations!

Limited edition Holiday Cards

You can see my other blogs by clicking here.



Merry Christmas!!!!!!