Colors and Light

Color and light are very important, and not just in your art but around your art. In college it was drilled into me to always use natural light when working and depending on what you're doing, one light source. Light effects how your colors look, artificial light had different colors and that effects how your colors look to you. If you make something under one color light and get it to look how you like and then display it under a different color of light, it could look funny.
Colors also effect how other colors look. Just the lighting and the background you have/use when taking a picture of/displaying your art can make a difference in how it looks.
Exhibits A and B same piece.

watercolor
6x6in
2012
Series: Hex

Piece of the Week...

So for the piece of the week, this is more of a pre piece of the week. I don't know what a lot of other artist's sketch books look like, but this is what one of my sketchbooks looks like.

 There's a lot of writing in my sketchbook, also there's generally a lot going on, I'll just use the space where I find it.  The writing at the top of the picture is from months and months ago The colored picture is from yesterday...

 I started doing this about a year ago where I do a little thumbnail of a piece to keep track of a series (this is the Genesis series), that way I can easily know how many pieces I have, if they've been finished, started, etc. if there's a title I write that down and maybe a note or two about what was behind the piece.

 I sometimes use colored pencil to either better capture the idea or experiment with possible colors.

Also like I said above, I go all over in my sketchbook and there's not really an up or down, I start from the front, the back, and use any page direction that's convenient.
Somehow I would guess that many people's sketchbooks look like, and not all of my sketchbooks look quite like this but there are a lot of similarities.

Sacred Geometry: A Primer

So a bit of a change this week. Instead of a how-to, a look at art that uses sacred geometry. If you can, you should check out this show at the Springville Museum of Art. I've talked before about my mentor Wulf Barsch, I might have changed my major if I hadn't gotten to have his classes; the show is a retrospective of his work. It was so cool to be able to see so much of his work in the same place, some I'd seen before and some that I'd never seen before. Anyway Wulf is where I learned about sacred geometry and he uses it extensively in his work.

 I thought this was a whole picture but it might just be a close up.

 Close up of the wejat eye. Can you spot the golden spiral?

These are some of the pieces in the show. You should go and see the show. Also you should check out the show in the B F Larsen gallery in the HFAC building at BYU, it's got some cool art connected to Islam.

Adventures in natural beauty

Today I had an unexpected adventure, a friend was taking the day off to hike and enjoy the fall colors and though I'm not a fan of hiking, I decided to go along. I am so glad I did, it's been a while since I've done fall colors up right and I was constantly saying "Wow!" the colors were so beautiful, it made me want to be a landscape painter, maybe even a plein air painter...almost. Here are some of the pictures, it was so much better in person though.

Photos of your work part 2

So mostly I take pictures of my work and mostly there's a lot of room for improvement. In working to get better photos I've been focusing on getting shots that I can crop well and accurately show my work and not too much of the background they're on. I've gotten a bit better at that but recently I've been reminded that there are other things that need to be kept in mind.

Lesser Lights

watercolor

9x9in

2012

Series: Genesis

These two pictures are a prime example, the first is well cropped but the second shows just how much the colors are off in the first photo.

Photos of your work

So I just got professional images of some of my pieces and they're awesome! I've taken pictures of my work and they range from awful to okay, with major improvement since I learned how to crop images. My pictures of my work could perhaps be even better with learning more about photography and/or editing but I think even with all that, my pictures really can't compare with those taken by a professional who specializes in photographing art. I learned about such a photographer while in school and I would love to be able to afford to have him take pictures of all my work for me. To illustrate my point, here's two pictures of the same image, my image I thought was a pretty good one, never the less I'm sure you can easily tell which one I did and which one was professional.

Morning
watercolor
9x9in
2012
Series: Genesis
Photo by Hawkinson Photography