“Crowded City Bus”
Acrylic on Multimedia Artboard, 12″ x 9″
©All images copyright 2006 by Tami Oyler.

This is a painting I did a couple of years ago during a “Weekend Drawing Event” on Wet Canvas. The idea of the WDE is to choose one of a dozen or so photos, and do a painting from it in two hours or less. There’s no time to over-think anything, so paintings fly off the brush with a freshness and spontaneity uncommon in studio work.

I brought this painting out because I’m having a painting crisis. I hope it will remind me of what I can do when I just RELAX and let the paint flow. I’m deep into my final deadline on the children’s book illustrations, and I hate what I’ve done so far. They’re too tight and stiff, and they’re taking much too long to do. (Can’t post any of them due to my contract.) My best paintings are done in four hours or less, but these are taking me days to complete. Working, reworking, ruining. I’ve been painting from early morning until late at night, every day, and if my husband didn’t feed me, I probably wouldn’t take time to eat.

Painting for someone else has me so uptight, all I can do is play it as safe as possible. I feel helplessly handicapped by all the restrictions put on me. I don’t feel connected to the work, because I’ve had to do things in ways I wouldn’t do them in my own painting. I’ve had to do endless preliminary sketches, something I worked hard to train myself not to do. I realize the art director needs to see what my ideas are, but it really makes it hard to do anything fresh when it comes to the final painting. I think that’s one of the reasons I can’t paint now. By doing all those sketches, my painting is overworked before I even lay brush to paper.

What I really hope is that this is one of those “darkest before the dawn” kind of turning points. I’m going to put my bus painting up where I can see it, get out a fresh sheet of paper, and just start throwing some color around. I’m going to do it MY way, not the way of the committee, and see if I come up with anything we can all live with. Wish me luck!

UPDATE:

Okay, I did my loose little exercise, then went back into an existing illustration that had gotten too tight, and redid it. These are detail shots from the larger painting. The “before” is on the left, the “after” on the right. I know some people might prefer the first, but the second one is a lot more “me.” Whew. I hope I can keep this up.

“Morning Run” by Lois Anderson, Copyright 2006
15″ x 30″ oil on canvas

“Interpretations” is now online. The show features the work of members of the Equine Art Guild. The show is an experiment in how different artists interpret the same reference photos. My last three blog paintings are there, along with many fine works by other artist members, such as the beautiful Lois Anderson painting featured in the show logo.

“Uphill Climb” finished
Acrylic on acid-free foam core, 12″ x 9″
©All images copyright 2006 by Tami Oyler.

After the last two paintings, I’m sick of doing fussy detail. It’s not me, or at least hasn’t been for twenty years or so. I’m ready for a change of pace. I want to do something free and colorful. So here we have Java Monster, a Thoroughbred at liberty in a snowy pasture in the original reference.

Roughed in the drawing quickly with a waterproof pen. Just trying to get the flow, rather than a detailed shape.

The acid free foam core gets a dip under a running faucet so both sides are wet. Then I start dropping paint on, letting it run wherever it goes.



More pure colors are dropped onto the wet paper. There’s no real plan here. Just doing what I feel like doing.

Here I’ve started to use opaque paint. I’m trying to stick with non-horse pure colors. It doesn’t matter if it’s “real.” I want to portray energy. I’m so sick of brown!

Here’s the funny thing about painting, through. You can do everything you can to NOT use brown, yet a combination of pure, bright colors can look like brown anyway. I now have a red, green, blue, and violet horse that looks a lot like the bay (reddish brown) horse in my reference.

I think I’ll call it finished. I’ve already put more paint on it than I intended to, and anything I do from here on out will just make it different, but probably not better.

These last three paintings look like they were done by three different people, don’t they?

If you like animal paintings, you’ve got to see this new daily painting blog. Some of you from Wet Canvas are already familiar with Dean. He’s one of the best painters I’ve seen in a long time, turning out these little wet-in-wet masterpieces so easily, so quickly. Back when I was participating in the two-hour timed painting event weekly on WC, and I was amazed at what this guy could do in two hours. Check it out!

“Four On The Floor” finished
Acrylic on Multimedia Artboard, 28″ x 8.5″
©All images copyright 2006 by Tami Oyler.

This is Doc, the same buckskin Quarterhorse from the last painting. I’m trying something a little different today. Instead of doing the entire horse, I’m doing just the feet. I want to see how much I can say about this animal without showing nothing more than feet and ankles.

It began with faint washes of water-thinned acrylic color. Most acrylics don’t handle this much water without breaking apart, but he paint I use is a concentrated liquid acrylic that holds up very well to thinning with water.

Since I started it like a watercolor, I’ve continued in that way, building color by adding more transparent layers. Just like in the last painting, I’m trying to use a palette more subtle than my usual all-out screaming color.

In the last stage, the paint was transparent. Now I’m working in opaque paint. The entire surface of the board has been covered.

From here on out, it’s about adding details and refining the shapes. The ankles still need some work to make them look right. I’m pleased with the tail so far.

About four more hours of work, and it’s pretty much done. I’ll let it sit for a few days and fix whatever bothers me. If I’m lucky, nothing will.

Today mixed in with all my usual scam & spam was one of those “I saw your art works on the web” spam mails from a Hotmail address. Judging from lack of corresponding hits on my sites, and the email address it was sent to, it probably originated on my EBSQ portfolio. Meaning a lot of you will probably get one, too.

I wouldn’t exactly call this a scam. It’s more of a really, really bad deal, designed to attract artists who know little about the web. The sender is an art appraiser with a Beverly Hills address who is selling artists “a PR 5 (pretty soon a PR 6) link” from his website. This is not web hosting, nor even a small single promotional page. It’s a 75×75 pixel thumbnail and a link to the artist’s existing website, for a fee of $19.99 a month. But hey, if you sell any work because of it, there’s no commmission fee!

Let’s look at this a little more closely. The root page of his site is PR5, and no one can predict future PR accurately. The intro page in the directory that contains the index to listings by country is a PR4. Still no artist links. To find those, I must go one link deeper, to a PR0 page. That’s PR ZERO. So the offer is $19.99 a month for a tiny thumbnail and a link from a PR0 page. Oh, and the opportunity to be associated with this unattractive website and this art appraiser dude I’ve never heard of.

If you have enough inbound links from a high PR site, it can help raise your own PR. But - even if he really was selling links from a PR5 page - a single PR5 link isn’t going to do a whole heck of a lot for you.

Both my link pages on this blog are PR4, and hey, I even have an Alexa ranking of 531,413 compared to his 1,515,963 rank. Maybe I should be offering to sell him links?

“The Grass Is Greener” completed
Acrylic on Fredrix Watercolor Canvas panel, 20″ x 16″
©All images copyright 2006 by Tami Oyler

My current painting in progress is of Doc, a buckskin Quarterhorse who led a life of misfortune rivaling Black Beauty’s before finding a permanent home with artist/photographer Juliet R. Harrison. This painting is for an Equine Art Guild member show show called “Interpretations.” Artists are limited to painting from a small collection of reference photos of two horses, Doc, and Javamonster, a bay Thoroughbred. The idea is to see the many ways artists interpret the same photographic reference.

Since my specialty is Thoroughbreds, Javamonster would seem the obvious choice for me, but I wanted the challenge of working with a different breed and color. Thoroughbreds don’t come in buckskin, and the last time I painted a buckskin was in 1980. I’m having more difficulty portraying this color than I expected.

The look I’m going for is a semi-formal portrait, a field pose, so it’s a little tighter than I usually paint. I want an early spring look, with the sun glowing on young, tender grass and the trees just starting to leaf out. Not my usual palette, so this is also a challenge. When it’s finished, Doc will be looking over a fence to the grass on the other side. Maybe even some other horses.

The drawing, done first in pencil, then reinforced with waterproof ink.

The canvas is first wet with water, then I throw on some bright colors, not really caring where they go.

A lot of paintings go through an ugly stage. This is one of them.

Starting to define the horse. I’m painting it darker than it will eventually be, because I like to layer light over dark.

Here you can see where I’ve added lighter paint over the darks. It pops like sunlight. At this point, I’m undecided about the ground in the foreground. The red wash wasn’t supposed to be permanent, but I kind of like it.

I opt to paint over the wash, and I’m still not sure if that was a good idea. This option commits me to painting a more detailed background than I usually do.

The difference in color between this one and the last is the difference between my scanner and my camera. Just adding more detail at this point.

It’s now a few days later, and in between working on this one I’ve completed a painting of just Doc’s feet. I’ve come back to this one and decided my dirt was too fussy and detailed, so I’ve redone it in a more painterly way. Also I’ve made some adjustments to the shadow color on the horse.

And later still…
AARRRGH!!!! This painting is driving me insane! I can’t seem to get the color of the horse right, nor the dirt below his feet. But I did find my transparent mixing white, and that has helped get rid of some of the chalkiness I was getting with my titanium white mixes. I’ve repainted the dirt yet again, this time in pastel colors instead of brown mixes, and while I’m not thrilled with it by itself, I think it now holds together better with the rest of the background because it picks up the colors of the trees.

Still plugging away at it. I’ve added the fence, and it helps a little. Still, I don’t think I’ll ever like this one. I consider it overworked and underdone at this point.

A halter and a few details are added, and I think we’ll call it done. I could have taken it further, but it’s time to get back to working on the book.

Painting still in progress. More to come!

Oil warm-up panel
Oil on Multimedia Artboard, 10.5″ x 8″
©Copyright 2006 by Tami Oyler

It’s been over a dozen years since I painted in oils. Real oils, not those funny water-miscible oil paints. I had to give up oil painting in the early ’90s when I realized the solvents I used were making me sick. Too bad, really, because I was just getting good at using them. Since then, I’ve taught myself to use other media, like acrylics and pastels, but I still miss oils sometimes. I miss the open time, the buttery smoothness of the paints, and the smell. I miss the marketability of oils, because whether I agree or not, it seems that a lot of people put a higher value on oils than acrylics or pastels.

So last week I pulled my old oils out of the back of a closet, and experimented a bit. Just noodling around with the paint, seeing how it felt, and more importantly, how I felt. I used a medium for thinning which is low in solvents, and I planned to clean my brushes with oil and soap instead of thinner.

I was hoping I’d discover I don’t really like oils anymore, but they felt pretty good under my brush. It was nice to have time to blend. Nice to be able to make thin lines that still had good coverage. I’d thought that maybe the colors would be too dull for me, after using acrylics for so long, but they really weren’t that bad.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for me to start feeling light-headed and shaky. My heart was racing, and my speech became slurred. I couldn’t focus on a thought for more than a few seconds. I knew my head would soon be pounding, and the next morning my joints would ache, and sometime in the next month I’d have little wart-like bumps on the backs of my hands. So I took my painting stuff out to the garage, and ran the ventilation fans to clear the house of the noxious fumes.

If you paint in oils, don’t let yourself become intolerant to solvents! Always, always use good ventilation, and don’t sleep where you work, because it’s that 24 hour exposure that will get you. Painter’s syndrome is not something that happens overnight. It creeps up on you after years of painting. When I used oils, I lived in apartments where it wasn’t safe or practical to keep windows open. That’s the worst possible thing I could have done.

Someday I’ll experiment with some M. Graham oil paints, which use a walnut oil binder, and can be used without solvents. Until then, I’ll stick to my formaldehyde-free acrylics.

“Red, White, and Blue Horses”
Acrylic painting on Multimedia Artboard, ACEO 2.5″ x 3.5″
©Copyright 2006 by Tami Oyler

Trying some more ACEOs. Working this small is difficult, yet I can see the appeal in these tiny trading card-sized collectibles. This one has gold metallic paint in the background, which is one of my favorite treatments for an equine painting.

Here are a few more. I’m trying to keep it loose and playful, not trying to create great art. The first was inspired by our puppy, and the other two are Pointy Head People, also inspired by our pointy head puppy:

Acrylic paintings on Multimedia Artboard, ACEO 2.5″ x 3.5″
©Copyright 2006 by Tami Oyler