These visitors to the feeders that hang outside the studio window make a working weekend much more enjoyable.
studio
Seymour Art Festival artwork preview
Here are a few detail photos, and work in progress images of the 4 pieces I’ll have in the Seymour Art Festival show at the Seymour Art Gallery from June 7-12, 2011. The opening night event is on June 7th from 7-9pm. The artists will be in attendance.
Night (from Vasilisa the Beautiful) | detail
charcoal, acrylic and metal leaf on canvas | 8′ x 4′ (two 4′ x 4′ canvases)
Night (from Vasilisa the Beautiful) | detail
charcoal, acrylic and metal leaf on canvas | 8′ x 4′ (two 4′ x 4′ canvases)
more after the jump
outside the studio/inside the studio
Young buck outside the studio yesterday.
An old tube of acrylic from my grandma’s stash. Note the warning on the label.
lululemon ~ Bethesda Row
A couple of months ago I did some work to hang in lululemon athletica’s Bethesda Row store. The piece has been shipped and installed so I’ve put a couple of images of it up in my illustration portfolio. The illustration was a lot of fun to put together. It involved creating reams of ink blots, a lot of scanning and a lot of piecing things together digitally. And finally, I painted over the printed canvas.
The illustration is meant to be a creative, colourful version of their manifesto. It is also in use as hoarding for a store (or stores) under construction. (It’s currently in use at the Soho, NY location.)
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Final artwork before stretching.
I don’t have photos yet of the piece hung at the current location, but I’ll post them when I do.
Images from the Studio Today
Images from the Studio Today
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illustration detail | oil on canvas
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illustration detail | oil on canvas
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Images from the Studio Today
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Book Sneak Peek ~ Finished, Packed and Shipped
Finished canvases still on the stretcher bars.
Early in July I finished the illustrations for my latest children’s picture book project Catching Time, written by Rachna Gilmore (Red Deer Press, pub.date Spring 2008). The illustrations were finally packed up and shipped out yesterday.
It’s been a long process. This is what my studio, and the weather, looked like at the beginning of the painting part of the project (in November ’06)…
…and this is what it looked like at the end (July ’07).
Canvas cut off the stretcher bars and ready for shipping.
I’ll post more photos of the illustrations, as well as photos of the illustration process once the book is out.
After about 2 1/2 years of book work, peppered with other projects slotted in here and there, I’m officially on my kid’s book illustration break for a while and it feels really, really good. While I’m book burnt-out, I’m not yet painting burnt-out and will be trying to find a few days here and there to get busy on some of my own work.
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Fresh Block
I’ll be doing some painting on location in the near future. Here’s to my first attempt at painting watercolours in the desert.
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Finding ‘That Thing’
I’m in the last week and a half of a deadline for a book I’ve been working on for ages. I’m spent. I’ve been painting every day for what seems like an eternity but is actually only 2 and a half months (for this project at least). Before that it was months of drawings and before that other projects and other books.
Some days are good painting days. Yesterday it was a good painting day. It was also a sunny, beautiful and even warm day. The window was open, the birds were singing and the light in the studio was perfect. Everything worked. Today it is grey, there is a light rain and painting is painfully slow. I’ve lost that little thread of inspiration. Nothing seems to connect right. It probably doesn’t help that I stayed up late watching Blade Runner on tv last night.
While I’m itching to be finished with this final project and have my life back for a while, I’m still looking forward to tackling my own paintings. I’m not completely tapped out. In fact, the more exhausted I get working on this project, the more excited I get about dragging the 5 big canvases out of the garage and tackling a series I’ve been thinking about for a while.
I don’t want to make it seem that this project isn’t enjoyable. It is. There are bits that are really exciting. Part of the enjoyment comes when I’m working on a composition that I haven’t solved entirely in the sketches. It’s fun when it comes together under my brush. Almost every illustration has something in it, that thing that captures my interest. I just have to dig into it to find it, otherwise I just feel like I’m filling in space with paint. Yesterday that thing was the way the scene in the illustration was lit. Our house was filled with low, gold February light and shadows cast by plants and furniture. Borrowing some of the light and the shadows cast by our bird of paradise plant on our dining room floor, I painted the shapes into the background of the illustration. Without connection to the piece, I feel like I’m just going through the motions and then the work feels empty.
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Workspace (2) Windowside
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Kirsti Wakelin 