Red and Green and PG 19

I have a couple new reds so I started a new color chart to test them out.

I also discovered I don't have a pyrrol red, which was discovered by accident.

Do I need one?

I ran the afternoon shift at the boathouse today, and on the way over I stopped at Blick to get that Old Holland PG 19.

I knew I had one in Blick/Sennelier, but it turns out I have a Gamblin too!

The Gamblin is noticeably darker and duller.  It tints to a lovely green-grey.

The Old Holland and the Blick/Sennelier match color-wise, but the pigment load in the Old Holland is much higher.

The tube is HEAVY.

This is to be expected since it is Old Holland.

The main reason I got my OH PG 19 before the boathouse was so I could show Kedrin, because she has the same appreciation for paint that I do. She gets it, she understands.

It's nice to have a friend like that.

We had good clouds today.

Fur Study

A few weeks ago I got a Jennifer Gennari course on Drawing America. 

She is a fantastic painter, specializing in animal portraits.

For a while I have been interested in seeing her workflow.

And since I went through the course, I have been wanting to try her workflow.

Interestingly it's very similar to how I have been working lately- oil only, no solvent.

She works in a VERY similar way to Patrick Okrasinski!

Here is Isis sleeping in the bathroom with her head upside-down, a big lump of fur.

This painting only took an hour and a half... I was surprised; I thought it would take longer.

The painting in the course was also done alla prima and took about the same amount of time.

9x12 oil

Her palette is also interesting and I approximated a few colors, which I definitely think are Good Enough.

Ivory Black

Venetian Red**

Fake Vermillion**

Alizarin

Cobalt Blue

Emerald Green**

Yellow Ochre

Cadmium yellow Light **

and Cremnitz White (lead)

Now, I'm all for fancy high-end oil paint but Ms Gennari beats me (and most people) with that.

If her system was my system and I was famous like she is, OR I was her student and only worked exactly how she works I would also use her exact palette.

Venetian Red **
She uses English Red which is the same thing.

I do have an actual "English Red" around somewhere but my Vasari Venetian Red is already out and it's the same pigment anyhow. They are interchangeable.

Fake Vermillion**

Oh my gosh she uses real Vermillion.... Michael Harding...

If you can find it, a great price is about $85 on Blick... Jerrys has it for $95 and the store at the League has it for $110 AND THEY ARE OUT OF STOCK. I think Rublev also makes genuine Vermillion.

Real Vermillion is also extremely poisonous and me myself personally...well, I don't think it is necessary.  I don't see the advantage. I'm gonna stick to my fake Lukas 1862 vermillion or Cadmium Red Light.

Emerald Green**

She uses a Michael Harding which is just a 3-pigment phthalo-based mix.

I have an old Utrecht tube that is exactly the same thing, same 3 pigments.

Cadmium Yellow Light **

Oh my gosh she uses ONLY Vasari Naples Yellow which is different (and better) than all other Naples Yellows in the whole entire world. It's about $71/tube and will last forever.

I kinda want one, to be honest.

...I could see myself getting it one of these days............

****

I did pull out my Michael Harding Cremnitz. (pure lead)

It's been a couple of years since I used lead and it takes some getting used to from Titanium White.

I feel like I used way more white than Jennifer did in her video.

I had to refill my palette 3-4 times; she never had to.

Now I have to watch that course again and see what else I can get from it.

More computer surgery

When I went into my computer to put in that new accidental hard drive, I saw empty RAM slots.

So I filled them with new RAM chips.

My computer is very happy with its Life Upgrade, and should now run nicely for several more years.

Things I did & a screw-up that solved big problems accidentally

Computer-related problems.

It can and will make a person batshit crazy.

I just solved 2 big ones by accident.

ONE

I have had a website problem for a while now, at least all of 2024, maybe 2023 too.

You won't see it on the front-end.

My website is Wordpress.

My media library folders were in triplicate across my dashboard for a very long time.

Uploading and organizing the back end worked but was annoying, and the interface looked wrong.

I played around with stuff and did some updates, nothing helped. I gave up.

Also I keep getting messages to update my php version.

PHP is a script that helps load a webpage from the server to the browser.

I have been trying to update my php for a very long time, but every time I do it, my site crashes so I have to roll back.

I have kept checking and trying this periodically. Nothing worked.

Last night I gave it another shot and updated every plugin on my website... my media folders went from triplicate to duplicate. Progress!

Php update still crashed the site.

I got frustrated and tired and quit.

Today I went back in...... idk how or why but my media folders are back to normal... so I went and updated the php again AND IT WORKED. I'm now on the latest version.

I don't know why or how but that solves 2 long-term website problems.

I guess servers needed time to process the updates from Friday which magically solved my other problems. Whatever, it works!

TWO

I run a 5 year old windows desktop at home.

Windows 11 has, inexplicably, taken up 118gb of a 125gb OS C:/ drive.

I have been trying for a long time to clean it up and minimize the size of Windows, which is the only thing on the drive.

I have scoured google and Reddit and tried a bunch of suggestions and nothing is working.

It's causing errors and is Not Good.

In desperation, I have even been considering the beginning thought process of having to get a new computer, which I don't want to do. My system is old but it is certainly Good Enough for what I need.

I am also out of Data storage, internally and externally.

This is important for my prints and setting up the image files, and personal archives.

I was going to get a huge (like 8TB) external SSD hard drive, but oh my god they are expensive.

Mark told me it might be better to have a few smaller ones, so if one drive fails I don't lose everything.

That made good sense so I ordered a 1TB solid-state external drive that was on sale for $64.

It arrived today.

I opened it and thought, wow that's small.

And then... where are the wires?

.... I accidentally ordered an internal drive.

Dangit.

And then I had the Bright! Idea! that MAYYYYBBBEEEE I could put a third hard drive in my computer, clone my current C:/ drive, make a larger partition for windows AND have more data storage.

I opened my computer, which wasn't nearly as dusty inside as I expected, saw an extra SATA connection, plugged the new hard drive in, got a cloning software for $20, changed the boot disk in BIOS, and IT ALL WORKS.

So my accidental wrong Amazon order solved my C:/ drive windows space issue AND gave me a nice 715gb internal data storage.

$85 to solve 2 problems is way better than the cost of a new external HD and/or a new computer eventually!

Breaking Art Barriers in The Village

I am on vacation this week, so I texted Thor to see when and where he was going out painting, so I could crash his painting day. (He doesn't mind.)

Pete Sinjin was also out painting today with his painter friend Tom Marsh, who is visiting here from the UK.

Thor said, "Let's go paint with Pete and Tom."

I said, "I know Pete is cool but do you think he'll mind?"

Thor said "Nah."

So I crashed Pete and Tom's painting day, and Thor came by a little later and did as well.

They did not mind at all. 

The first painting I did is on the corner of Charles and W4th, 8x10 oil

Here is the second painting,  Grove and Bleecker, 8x10 oil

Various assorted pictures:

Pete, Tom, Thor, Me

Pete had a light blue paint on his palette.

It was glowy in a very nice way.

So I asked him what it was.

He said he didn't know, he picked it up in France.

And he gave me a big glob of it from his palette! You can see it in the second painting.

Now, in case you didn't know by now, I'm a paint super-geek.

With the exception of small international brands, I know ALL the paint brands.

And I was pretty sure Pete's Mystery Paint wasn't a Sennelier, because I'm familiar enough with their line to know they don't have a lot of convenience colors.  And I know it is something mixed with white.

Probably a phthalo of sorts.

The other French paint I know is Charvin, which Jerry's sells.

I know it's French but also kind of always thought it might be fake-French.

It's Real-French.

So I went to the Jerry's website and looked at Charvin and sure enough..........thought I found a match or two.  One of the reasons I never got into the Charvin brand is that most of their line is different convenience mixes, and for the most part I only use single-pigment paint. With very few exceptions.

All those mixes are GREAT! for pastels but completely unnecessary in oil paint.

I asked Pete to send a picture of the tube when he got home and sure enough, it's a Charvin.

I got one.

And a purple too.

****************

The most important part of today wasn't the paintings or the lovely Charvin blue.

I texted a few pictures to Daya about the day and why it was so important.

There is nothing like the feeling of personal artistic achievement, and it doesn't have to be visible to others or showcased. I guess that's nice too, I wouldn't really know, but it isn't necessary to know your own achievement.

It also needs to be said that 

just being around other people 

who are better than you are 

will advance you.

They are not there to be my teachers nor do I ask them to do that.  It's osmosis, which is a very real thing. It used to come up at Pratt too- we were told never to sit next to the same people too much because all our stuff would start looking the same.  It was true. 

Will Weston invites former students into his classes just to draw and be present so the rest of the room can pick up the energy.  

Stapleton Kearns specifically says he's an uploader, and it's 100% true.  If you are ever in a class with him you'll get a huge download of information that isn't from him telling you stuff.

What I said to Daya:

Daya IS an advanced artist and I respect her for it.

It's probably my fault she got such a severe case of Artist Brain but at least she's really doing something with it.

*****

Just a note about time on plein airs... I do always track the time but it's for personal informational purposes. I never set out to finish a painting in a certain amount of time.  The time thing just happens on its own.  I have gotten faster but not because I meant to or even particularly wanted to.  It's just something that has happened organically through experience. 

I did push my speed today to keep up and it turned out to be a really good thing because I didn't get too caught up or slowed down in unnecessaries. But it was something that comes from experience. I couldn't have done it 2 years ago.

Ironically, it takes a very long time to get fast.

Same as how Doug always says "Make haste, slowly."

(and "When in doubt, thin it out!"- which does not apply to oils.)

__PRESENT

Princess Leia, a Star Wars Cat

Here is a commission I just finished.

It is for a friend's husband. (He is my friend too.)

This is a portrait of his cat who has passed, she was a very special cat to him, and her name was Princess Leia.

So this painting is a hybrid of Star Wars and Elder Scrolls Online, in the layout style of Medieval books of hours.

And now I know how to paint light sabers in oil paint, which I guess is a cool skill.

Total painting time was about 12 hours over several sessions, but I also had to do a bit of planning and research which took a while as well.

9x12 oil

Cat detail

******

This painting was so ugly for a long time.

Progress shots:

Away

I went to Connecticut for two nights and left Daya home alone overnight for the first time.
She's old enough and mature enough and she was fine.

But it was her first alone-overnight, so I said to her "If your friend isn't available to chat and you feel lonely, go on my computer and see if Cas is online.

I thought I would get an eye roll and a response like "Mom I have my own friends."

Instead, Daya got way too excited and said "I'm going to play ESO!"

And she did.

She went on MY Discord account and logged in to MY Elder Scrolls Online account and was in voice chats gaming with MY friends on MY characters running events with MY guild Saturday and Sunday!

I have Discord on my phone too so I could see her on there. (Which she knows.)

*****

Cathy has foster kittens.
They are ridiculous.

I also visited the rats.

Dizzy kept coming over to say hi to me, which Cathy says is unusual.
She clearly remembers me. Which makes sense because we are old friends.

Repurposed Vintage

I took AP Art twice in high school.
That was when I got my first set of "real" artist pencils, the Derwent Graphic set.
This tin is from 1993-4.

This tin got extremely banged up in my locker.
And I still use it.

Until tonight, it even had Derwent pencils in it.

I got some Tombow graphite pencils because Kevin Wueste recommends them, and some General's charcoal pencils because they are cool.  I added in the General's white charcoal (best white chalk pencil ever, forever a classic) and a sanguine conte pencil.

There are 2 erasers in the far left slots... my Tombow pencils came with a 2.3mm detail eraser, how cool is that?

This is how I keep the tin next to me during drawing, now with switched out pencils.

Week 10 Checkmate

Double-digits, people.
Fucking double-digits.
I'm more burnt out on this virus crap than I have been about anything, ever.

*****
Current Retro Game: Battle Chess.

Storytime, well 2 of them:

******
Once upon a time way back in 1988, (I think I was in 5th grade) before we even had a computer in my home, we were at the mall and there was a computer game store that had a demo running of Battle Chess.

I was instantly smitten.
I wanted a computer just to get that game.

The household computer didn't come until a few years later and I got Battle Chess for Christmas because I was still smitten with it.
(I do still have my original disks and packaging but they are buried somewhere and I don't feel like digging for them.) It looks like this:

Although I am a truly terrible chess player, I still love it.
I still think Battle Chess is the best computer chess game ever created.

I have won it exactly twice.

You can play it free here, and it is also on Steam!!!

*******
Once upon a time a couple of weeks ago, one of my ESO guilds started a chess contest.
Someone built a playable chess board in their ESO house and it is awesome. I mean, AWESOME.

Everyone was invited to sign up and I did, and last night was the match.
I lost, of course, but it was really fun.

With online gaming, it's anonymous for the most part so you never really know who you are playing with. I thought maybe I'd get paired with some young kid who was possibly more terrible than me.

Nope, my partner spoke in chess notation.
I knew I was done.

Not only that, but in the chats they said the words Battle Chess....... so I put a feeler out.... "rook eats queen" AND THEY GOT IT.

I sent them an email with the Classic Reload link and they replied saying they have ALL the old DOS games and might start streaming them.

So, that was a fun encounter.