Revising a Painting

Posted on by Erin Bartels

Last night I reworked an older painting of mine using new skills developed over the past year.

Here’s what has been over my fireplace mantel for about a year or perhaps a bit longer:

I’ve always been unhappy with the water and felt the sand and sky were too yellow, though I liked the clouds. Then I got better at water through practice. And the lovely thing about oil paints is that you can paint over what you already have to fix it, unlike watercolor. Here’s the new and improved painting:

I didn’t paint over the whole sky, just near the horizon. The truer color is in the second photo.

What I was really lacking in the water in the first iteration was light, shadow, and definition. Everything was basically one color. Actual water registers as many colors, which change depending on the light, reflections, water clarity, and what’s at the bottom of it.

This painting still isn’t perfect. I have to get better about light sources. But it’s probably as good as I’m going to make it.

For a while now I have had an Etsy store called Erin’s Artful Life, but it’s been quiet of late. I don’t have much extra time to update it. So I am going to be moving my artwork over to my website. Soon you’ll see a new page (creatively named Artwork) where I’ll put pictures of my paintings and whatever else I may decide to create in the future. Some of it will be available for purchase. Some of it won’t.

Hopefully I will get to that in the early part of 2020. All part of simplifying my online presence so it feels less overwhelming. As this year closes out, that’s what’s on my mind.

New Paintings in the Shop!

Posted on by Erin Bartels

There are seven new paintings in the shop, and several markdowns on others so I can make room for more in the coming months.

Here’s what’s new:

Head on over to Erin’s Artful Life to see more. It’s not too early to start thinking about holiday gift giving. (Well, it is, but I encourage you to do so all the same.)

Fixing a Painting that Was Almost Right

Posted on by Erin Bartels

Sometime last year I painted this picture of an August sunrise in mid-Michigan.

It was almost right. I loved the sky, the mist, the clouds.

But I hated, hated, hated how the big trees turned out. It was not what I had in mind.

That’s the trouble with learning an art. So often we can picture or imagine what the finished product — be it painting or novel or what have you — ought to be, but we lack the skills to bring our vision to fruition.

Well, I’ve been painting a lot lately, and reading books about painting. And something clicked in my brain about those trees. So I got the painting back on the easel and worked on it for about twenty minutes or so. And this is what I came away with.

I fixed the trees! I made them darker, since they are in silhouette, made the edges more defined, and added sky holes where you can see what is behind it peaking through spots with fewer leaves. Now they look so much more like what I had in mind.

While I was at it, I darkened the top of the clouds a bit and added some foreground detail.

I used to be disappointed in this painting. Now I love it. And it’s satisfying to see my technique improve as I practice.

What have you been practicing lately?

An Indulgent Weekend

Posted on by Erin Bartels

I probably should have been doing all the laundry this weekend. Instead, I painted.

I painted this…

…and this…

…and this.

Because that’s what I really wanted to do.

I also decided that one wall of my office could double as a drying rack / storage area for paintings until they found new homes.

I’m even hanging some blank canvases in spots until I fill them up.

And that gold-framed mirror over on the left wall? That’s there for when I want to start trying my hand at painting faces. I guess I’ll start with mine.

The 3-Month Painting of Manido Falls

Posted on by Erin Bartels

Hello, stranger! It’s 2018 and I have a moment to breathe. In fact, it’s my 38th birthday, which means I have the day to myself. Because of winter break, I never went to school on my birthday, so when I joined the working world, I decided I would never work on my birthday either. I take the day off and putz around. It’s marvelous, especially after the craziness of Christmas, my wedding anniversary, New Year’s Eve, and taking down the Christmas decorations. Added to it all this year were two and a half trips to Grand Rapids, with much of the way during one of those trips being in near-constant white-out conditions; one trip to Bay City; two funerals, which were emotionally draining; and a low-level sickness of some sort almost the entire time.

BUT, it’s my birthday today so I’ll do what I want to.

And I wanted to paint.

Back in October, before the kitchen renovation project got underway, I started a new painting.

I got this far.

And then I screwed up. I had to paint over my mistake and wait a couple weeks for the paint to dry so I could continue. Then the holidays happened.

Today I dove back in head first. I added the waterfall I had previously botched.

And when that seemed to go well, I added everything else.

I’m really happy with the results. The subject is Manido Falls, which you may remember from this post about the tail end of my epic Upper Peninsula road trip this past June.

It’s not an exact representation but an interpretation. I’m trying to break myself of attempting to recreate photos and instead consider a painting on its own terms. In this case that meant added red tones to the rocks that weren’t that strong in the original photo in order to complement the greens of the trees.

Once this is dry I will list it in my Etsy store, Erin’s Artful Life.

 

Coming Back to the Light

Posted on by Erin Bartels

What a week. Enough flu for everyone.

Thankfully there have been flowers as well, both inside…

…and out.

The earliest blooms are out in the back yard gardens. The Lenten Rose (hellebores)…

…and the Siberian Squill (scilla)…

…and these tiny little guys, who have made themselves quite at home in one of my beds…

They’re a weed called Veronica Speedwell I’ve decided to let stay because I need groundcover in that spot anyway and have had limited success with the plants I actually planted in this very sunny, dry area. We’ll see what they do the rest of the year. If they behave nicely, I may keep them. They can be invasive, though, so I may regret it later.

At any rate, I’m still in no shape to deal with getting the garden cleaned up for spring. It’s on its own for a few more days at least as I recover fully from the flu. It’s a shame to have wasted some perfect gardening days sitting in a stupor inside, but there it is. Nothing can be done about it.

While recovering, I was lucid enough to enjoy two literary moments of significance. First, I got my latest manuscript back from the German translator who was helping me translate certain lines of dialogue into correct German, and also helping me with the elements of the plot which touch on translation issues between English and German. She had some very nice things to say about the manuscript and encouraged me to let her know when it found a publisher so she could tell her editors to be on the lookout for the translation rights. It was a wonderful boost of confidence for me as she is the first person who has actually read it in full.

The second moment came the next day, Sunday, when I received an email from one of the editors of The Lyric poetry magazine accepting one of my poems for a future issue. I don’t have any details yet, but I’ll be sure to share more when I know more.

And then Sunday night I felt normal enough to paint.

I based this painting on a photo I took years ago over a field in the Grand Ledge area before sunrise back when I was occasionally picking up a friend early in the morning to carpool to Grand Rapids. There was that glow in the sky that just precedes the sun, and a fine mist among the distant trees. One of those moments that is so fleeting and that you rarely get to experience when your house is smack dab in the city like ours.

So, I’m basically feeling normal now. I’m back to work (at home, as always) and though it is the beginning of Spring Break, the house is finally empty after our week of sickness. My husband has taken our son and the neighbor boy off on an adventure and my only companion is my canary, Alistair. I have a full inbox to deal with and some laundry that needs a kickstart. Time to brew a cup of coffee and see if I really am indeed back to normal — the worst part of the flu has been that my taste buds (we actually call them taste bites in this family) seem to be confused and coffee is the most dire casualty. Good, dark roast coffee has tasted like diner coffee with almost-turned cream. I’m hoping today might be the day everything gets back to normal…

Oil Painting: August Sunrise

Posted on by Erin Bartels

I haven’t painted in a week, as I have just been too busy with work, freelance, and some very pleasant obligations to friends. But sometime last week, I did manage to paint this scene of a misty August sunrise.

It, along with six other oil paintings, is available in my newly revamped Etsy shop, Erin’s Artful Life.

Once upon a time I sold vintage teacups, handmade jewelry, and at least one handmade scarf on the site. But I’ve renamed and rebranded it as my virtual gallery. I invite you to stop in there and look around, even if you’re not in the market yourself. Perhaps you’ll find a gift for someone else.

I’ll keep stocking the shop as I finish paintings, and I hope to find time later this spring to develop a cost-effective system for making prints of some of my watercolors so that more than one of each will be available.

If the painting above has caught your fancy, just be aware that it is still drying and shipping would be delayed, possibly a few weeks, in order to allow it to dry completely.

Home from Orlando, Dreaming of Albuquerque

Posted on by Erin Bartels

Last week my husband and I took our eight-year-old son on our first big out-of-state family vacation. When the boy was five and just starting his martial arts training, we promised him that when he earned his black belt, we would take him to Disneyworld. Three years flew by and lo and behold, it was time to go.

Our little man took his first airplane ride.

We went to the Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, and Disney Hollywood Studios…

Plus Legoland…

We swam in the outdoor pool, watched the palm trees sway in the breeze, enjoyed many interesting conversations with Uber drivers, and generally enjoyed watching our son have so much fun.

We came home to unseasonably warm weather in Michigan, though we know better than to hope it will last. And we’re getting back into the swing of things at work, church, and school.

But I find myself already looking ahead to the rest of the year’s travel. Zach to Israel, the boy and I to the Upper Peninsula, all of us to camp. And once more, in September, I get to head out to Albuquerque for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association annual retreat. The secret Facebook group for attendees has been opened and everyone is already abuzz with excitement! So I thought it would be a perfect time to work on the painting for the cover of this year’s retreat notebook.

Last year, I was flattered when our retreat coordinator and WFWA founding president, Orly Konig, asked to use the painting I did when I came home from the 2015 retreat as the image for the 2016 retreat notebook:

This year she asked me to do another. So this is what I painted today…

It’s the same lovely fountain, but much closer and from a different angle, and I composed the shot such that the background was easy to put text over and it is a portrait orientation. I’m very happy with how it turned out!

I believe I’ll get some good, professional scans done on both of these paintings so that I can make prints later, but I’m thinking about putting both of the originals in the retreat raffle. I’m also cooking up a new Etsy shop in which I can make my paintings available for purchase. They’re piling up in the house and I need to find them homes! Watch this space for more information about that in the coming months.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Posted on by Erin Bartels

This week I read a great column in Writer Unboxed by Sarah Callender about navigating between hope and despair, and the part writers have in “disturbing the universe.” She used a line from T. S. Eliot‘s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, “Do I dare disturb the universe?” as a provocative jumping-off point, which reminded me how much I love that poem.

I was going to write that inspiring line down on a post it and stick it to my computer monitor. But that didn’t seem enough. So I thought I’d type it out in some interesting font, print it, and tape it up somewhere. But then that didn’t seem enough. So I concocted a little plan to do a painting. This is the result.

I’m not sure if it’s actually done yet. I may add another layer after this one is dry. But here is how I went about painting it.

First I typed up the line, chose fonts and sizes, and then printed it. I cut the words apart and arranged them how I thought they would fit on the canvas. Then I taped the pieces together and taped them to the back of the canvas so that, when a very bright light was positioned at the back, the black letters would show through.

Next, I painted over the letters with black gesso, which is a fast-drying acrylic medium.

Once I had all the letters in place, I let them dry.

I knew I wanted the corners to be very dark, so I sponged black gesso all around the outside, almost like a vignette.

I let it dry overnight, though I probably didn’t have to. When I was ready to paint today, I covered the whole thing with a coat of liquid clear.

Then I started to lay in the color. I chose only transparent or semi-transparent paints so that the black text would show through and I started with the brightest (indian yellow).

Now, as I tend to do, I forgot about taking any more photos as I laid in all the rest of the colors. But after they were on the canvas, I didn’t exactly like how they came together. So instead of trying to blend them together and hide the brush strokes, I swirled them all with a 2″ brush so that the brushstrokes would be part of the effect.

As I said, I’m not sure that I would consider this done at this point, but I think I need to let this layer of paint dry before making any further decisions about it.

This was a nice change of pace from landscapes and I got to use some very bright colors, which was fun. Of course, it doesn’t match any room in the house, so who knows what I’ll end up doing with it!