Almost inked storefront

Inked shop front

The inking has almost been finished on the Jasper store front.  I just have the signage and the left background to do.  I am looking forward to using the watercolors on this one.  It has red brick with white brick patterned in across the top and under the windows.  Once again, the trim will be a light green and yellow but a band of painted brick also carries across the top.  I wonder if the shops here got together and coordinated the color schemes.

All of these details will be harder to paint, but it will make this shop streetscape unique.  Once it’s done, it will go into my etsy store.  Two of my Jasper drawings have been sold, so it appears that some townspeople appreciate their lovely town square as much as I do.

Another Jasper streetscape

Another Jasper storefront

I looked at the date of my last post and couldn’t believe it has been a month since then.  Such was my May.  We had one out of town family move and another period helping an elder family member start the process to downsize and move into a more assisted living situation.  I think I spent about as much time out of town as in.

But now I’m back to the drawing table with an old standard.  I really love this small town main square.  Jasper has one of the most colorful downdowns I have seen in Indiana and I love depicting all of the colors of the buildings.  Here is the pencil up of another red brick/green trim shop.  Let the inking begin.

 

The three amigos

The three amigos

The three calves painting is now finished and I am fairly happy. I think the one thing I might change is to have made the whole thing somewhat larger. In hindsight, trying to cram all of these guys into a 6×7 frame made it more difficult than perhaps was necessary.  I had a harder time inking with the thicker nib pen and there wasn’t as much room to layer the defining colors.  Lesson learned. Give each animal room enough for its own space.

Three calf pencil up

Three calves

Last fall I started to pencil up this sketch of three calves that lived across our road.  They made a nice composition and fortunately are three different colors.

Holiday commissions and then a surprising six orders first of the year pushed this little drawing to the back of the line. Then I took a pen and ink break to do the fruit paintings because I needed to do something different for a bit.

Fruit Paintings: Part 3

Pear

And lastly a tomato and a pear.  I think I like these two the best out of the six.  I am varnishing them right now and should have all of these 8×10’s listed in my shop sometime this week.  It has been a fun break from the precision of all of that ink work.

After that, I think I’ll go back to a little drawing of three calves that I started way back last fall before the Christmas rush started.

Tomato

Fruit Paintings Part 2

Strawberries

Next up was strawberries and an apple.  These are all 8×10’s.  I like the smaller size as it is not too intimidating for me at this point.  I really need to take an acrylic class again, just to get some tips on manipulating the paint.  I have problems dealing with the thickness of the paint and using the drying speed retardant.

In any case, I was pretty happy with the way these turned out. Once again I raided my refrigerator for inspiration and came up with these.  And the nice thing is, when I’m done, I can eat the scenery props.  Which I did.  LOL

Granny Smith apple

A nice surprise in the mail

The Journal Cover

I had a nice surprise come in the mail last week.  Remember when I had the architectural drawing selected to appear on the Education journal?  Well, my copies arrived.  I thought it should be about now because it was for the spring edition and I had just emailed my contact the day before if she knew a particular date.  Voila,  it was in the mail box.

Jessica Millete handled the process for me and did a nice job.  I sent huge raw photo files that I could’t even see with my computer to her at the media company involved.  I had never worked with something for publication and hadn’t the slightest idea of what was needed.  There was a short timeline and not enough time for me to figure it all out.  But she fixed up the four different architectural drawings I sent and submitted them.  Extra work for her, but a definite bonus for me.  This is the one that was selected.  The picture selected was nicely cropped and I think shows well.  Thank you Jessica and Sara Shahabi.