Chore Day, Aug 24, 2019 -- Bean and Sweet Potato Burgers, Humus, and Curried Cauliflower

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The bean and sweet potato burgers were for my furry friends. As for the humus and curried cauliflower, I’m happy with the recipes I’m using, but I doubled the spices. I have a deep appreciation for hot, spicy food.

I spent about four hours cooking. Usually I listen to hair metal bands — Poison, Motley Crue, Quiet Riot, and so on — but today I propped my iPad propped on the kitchen table so I cold binge watch Jame Gurney’s water color and gouache Youtube videos. That guy is amazing. He’s the Leonardo da Vinci of DIY for art, illustration, and painting. And dinosaurs.

No picture today. Ran out of time.

Chore Day, Aug 10, 2019 - A Message in a Bottle

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Dear Diary, today was chore day. I started the day by cooking up a batch of food for my boys — black bean and sweet potato “burgers”. My youngest boy is a Pomeranian who thinks he’s in charge of the whole world. My other boy is a mature Pug who thinks only about getting his next meal. The Pomeranian hates what I cook. I tell him to get a driver’s license and drive down to the co-op to buy his own food. He ignores me.

Besides cooking dog food today, I reread James Gurney’s Color and Light. This book is a real game changer for me. I can now look at my paintings and see where I’ve abused my color palette. I’ve also learned how to create a color palette that unifies the colors in my paintings. Unfortunately, the colors in my children’s picture book are all over the place. I’ll do what I can to improve them before I publish the book.

If I were marooned on a desert island, I would send out a message in a bottle to every beginning painter. It would go something like this…

If you have any desire to produce paintings that do not expose you as an amateur, learn about color gamuts.

Krita has a built-in gamut mask creator. This screenshot shows that I don’t know how it works…yet! Fortunately, Aaron Rutten has a great video showing how to use the Krita gamut mask tool. Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ch3M57N8-o


Busy with inDesign, Organizing Images & Hip, Hip, Hooray! to James Gurney

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Since I started this project I’ve been dealing with my demons. I’ve been aware that I’m scattering images over multiple directories and computers. When I have to edit one of them, I can’t find it. It’s gotten so bad I have images on my iPad that aren’t on my desktop. I have images on iCloud or Onedrive; I have images stored in emails. There are images, even PSDs in my Downloads directory. And on my Desktop! What in the hell was I thinking?

So I’m dealing with those demons now because they’ve come back to bite me, hard, now that I’m redoing some images to work in a square 8” by 8” page.

In more interesting news, I received James Gurney’s Imaginative Realism - How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist today. In fact, I got two copies — I accidentally double-ordered from Amazon. It’s obvious that I’m enthralled with James Gurney’s concept art and his instructive books. His Gurney Journey website is a treasure of thoughtful information in these dark days when so many artists are sequestering themselves in their closed-off Facebook accounts. There’s nothing sadder than to visit an artist’s website only see the message “I’m moving to Instagram/Facebook.” I could name a few, but I don’t want to go down that dreary road. However, I will say “Hip, hip, hooray!” to James Gurney for doing his part to keep the open Web alive.

Sunday Al Fresco Art Club Challenge, Aug 4, 2019 -- Gamut Mapping

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This week’s Al Fresco Art Club challenge was to use a restricted color palette to paint a masterpiece. I chose to repaint “Farmhouses near Bellevue” by Paul Cézanne. I painted this masterpiece two weeks ago, but Artrage failed to save my work. Or maybe I failed to save it. I really don’t know.

This restricted palette challenge was inspired by the “Creating Gamut Masks” chapter in James Gurney’s Color and Light. I created a gamut mask in Artrage with the aid of Aaron Rutten’s Gamut Masking Tool, which he explains in his Youtube video Color Gamut Masking Tool for Artists. Aaron is a cool guy —- I love artists who freely share their knowledge.

Here’s the gamut mask I created using Aaron’s tool. I examined Cézanne’s painting and picked the predominant colors. However, for the sake of experimentation, I intentionally chose to limit blues. Neutral gray serves as blue in this color scheme.

Getting this palette into Artrage was a pain — Artrage for iOS can’t import PSD files. To work around this, I created the gamut mask in Procreate, which does handle PSD files perfectly, then exported a PNG to the iOS Photos app, then imported the “photo” into Artrage. File handling is a tragic affair on the iPad. The idea of using an iPad as a general purpose computer is a joke.

Here’s my attempt to repaint a Cézanne masterpiece. The five swatches at the top of the painting were picked from the color gamut and used for all of the colors in this painting. I did adjust the value of some colors to get some darks into the painting. Overall, I like the mix of colors, a lot.