Third Eye Samurai

What I have noticed lately is the colors are showing up in my paintings, either what I need or a reflection of my healing of the chakras. It became pretty evident in my last painting, showing red, yellow and purple. Remember the base of the spine is represented by red, an indicator for a need of stability and survival, yellow governing self-esteem and wisdom, and purple relating to our higher self and higher consciousness. They also represent different organs in the body.

I am currently taking The Blog Triage class by Alyson Stanfield and Cynthia Morris. She was asking me the other day about my tag line: “Art in life and spirit in art” – “What does it mean to you?” I realized that my spirit shows in all my work and it is a reflection of my life at that particular moment that I painted the painting. As I live my life, my spirit is reflected in my art. Also speaking of spirits, the title of this piece is “Third Eye Samurai”. Do you also see the spirits of the Samurai in this painting? I didn’t realize they were there until I took the photo, yet my husband noticed them right away. But, that may be a whole other blog.

My intention is for you to discover healing when seeing my paintings, that the colors can also have a positive psychological and spiritual affect for each observer that owns one of my paintings.

This is the twentieth painting of my #paint52 challenge, Atelier Interactive Acrylics on a museum wrapped canvas, measuring 24” X 36”, price $2160.

As always I cherish your comments. Thank you!

Dark Night of the Soul ~ 7 3/4" X 10" Acrylic on Velum $180.00

In my early years of painting, in my teacher George de Groat’s class, I noticed a woman painting across from me, using a bright pink, pinker than any pink that I have experienced. I had to ask her where she got it. She mentioned it was permanent rose, by Shiva Signature Oils. I ended up purchasing it and found it to be intense and highly saturated and of course wonderful. It was the beginning of my drug habit.

Wolf Kahn said he has a person make his pastels. He wanted a special blue and what he told her was “I want a blue, bluer than any blue you have seen before”. He did get his wish. That’s what I want. I want to use and have color combinations that most people have never seen before. I want the viewer to be taken on a color trip.

Wolf Kahn~Color and Consequence

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have found in my search for colors that certain brands are better than others for certain colors. You can’t beat Daniel Smith for their Indian Yellow, Phthalo Turquoise and Quinacridone pigments. Do you have a favorite color? Does it have to be a particular brand?

Cross Over ~ 4 1/4" X 6 3/4" Acryllic on Velum $67.00

You know it kind of reminds of that line from English Patient, when Almasy says “It is a very plum plum.” Color can take you to that place, that extra hyper sense of actually being able to taste, hear, smell, or feel its temperature. It can take you to another world, my hallucinatory world of Technicolor.

Valley of the Heart

With a commitment to building a more vibrant blog, I signed up for the 4-week Blog Triage class with Cynthia Morris and Alyson Stanfield. Today’s assignment is to describe the people I want to visit and read my blog.

This is difficult for me to pinpoint exactly who should read my blog, but I will say my intention is to bring you beauty, inspiration, education and innovation.

How will I do this?

Beauty: Through my creations whether it is my poetry or art, I hope to allow a space for respite and renewal.

Inspiration: Through my #paint52 Series, which takes you on a journey of my challenge to paint 52 paintings in one year, I hope to inspire you to create as well.

Innovation: Through alternative ways to create digitally and other mediums of exploration in art, become familiar with ways that can enhance your creations.

Education: By bringing to you art tips, history and literature regarding art.
my desire is to create dialogs with my friend’s fans and collectors.

In this fast moving world of left-brain activities, I hope to open your heart, stimulate your mind and feed your soul.

Gli Aberi di una Bambina

Trees of a little girl is the translation of the title. When I was three and a half years old I moved from New Jersey City, where my father was stationed at Fort Monmouth, to Adak, Alaska, part of the chain of the Aleutian Islands. To say that we were living in a remote area was an understatement. I don’t remember taking the train across the United States to get there, but I do remember the boat trip through ice and snow and having my father, who left prior to us, pick me up in a jeep at night wearing a parka with a hood trimmed with fur. He then drove us to our quonset hut, where we lived for the next 6 months waiting for our barrack to be built. I felt like an Eskimo living in this hut. All of this was quite magical for me.

Adak, Alaska

View of a Thousand Trees

This is my seventeenth painting toward my #paint52 challenge. It measures 24 X 36, mixed media, acrylic and oil on canvas, price $2160. I appreciate you all for visiting and following my challenge, thank you so much and if you leave a comment that’s even better.

Lover's Leaf

I have the most beautiful Chinese Maple in front of my house. Early spring weather has brought it into full bloom already. It’s magnificent and as usual I attempted to see if I could express its beauty. Sometimes that’s the problem with painting nature. It’s almost impossible to make it as beautiful. In fact, my teacher once said; if you can’t improve it then don’t change it. Ha, that sounds like the judges talking to the contestants on American Idol. They always think they can make it better than the original creator. Yet, when I create landscape paintings, I just wish I could give you a piece of what I see, a morsel of God, the passion, the brilliance, the colors.

This is my 16th painting for my #paint52 challenge. The painting measures 24″ X 36″ Atelier Interactive acrylic on a museum wrapped canvas (Framing isn’t needed). Available for purchase $2016. Thanks so much for visiting.

One of my favorite books is “Oil Painting the Workshop Experience” by Ted Goerschner. I decided to give his pallet a try, which includes, (four earth tones) terra rosa, burnt sienna, raw sienna and yellow ochre; (four spectrum colors) cadmium yellow-medium, cadmium orange, cadmium red light, cadmium red medium, alizarin crimson, manganese violet, magenta, ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, viridian and sap green; (black and white) ivory black and titanium white. I found that I love some of additions to my normal pallet and some I found didn’t work for me. But in general, I did love exploring a different pallet. I did find that his pallet lent to some beautiful neutrals and grays. And as we all know, that the neutrals allow the spectrum colors to sing. This is the painting that I created using his pallet.

In Between

I realized after I painted this painting that I wanted to take my landscapes a step further. I want to push them and have them be unique. I want to be able to call them my own. This painting taught me. I had a glimpse of what it could be. Some paintings do that. Some teach you if you allow and take the risk. This only can evolve after painting a lot and painting regularly. I do feel that this challenge is helping and forcing this to happen in a natural way. I decided to take this image and push it again. Here’s what came about.

I like it, yet I do feel that the next painting will be somewhere in between both of these, not so realistic, yet not so abstract. But I am willing to have the painting tell me where it wants to go. I’m pretty excited to see what will happen.

This was my fourteenth and fifteenth painting of my #paint52 challenge. Thanks once again for following me on my journey. It’s so appreciated.

Twitter Followers

I was enticed to paint this painting reflecting the common people, people in our everyday life, such a variety, all unique and distinct. But there was also something “sheepish” about how they were marching all in a row, making sure they kept their appropriate space from the person in front or behind. Some seemed conscious, while others were definitely not present. They almost seemed to be marching, and marching, where? Where are they going? Are we caught following others, sometimes forgetting our own journey or perhaps following others dreams not our own? Or just caught in our daily life routines, one day the same as the next, just out of habit. Can we wake up and enjoy our surroundings?

This is painting thirteen of my #paint52 Challenge and another painting for my San Francisco series. “Twitter Followers” measures 24″ X 48″, oil on linen.

Thanks again for all your support following my challenge and especially when you leave a comment. I so appreciate it.

What not to wear

Have ever wondered where your painting was going? I have put myself in such an odd situation with this painting and a lot of firsts. So many that I didn’t know where or what was going to happen next. First of all, painting a red under-painting, with green being the dominat color, created a very narrow bridge for me to walk on. That’s what happens when you take risks. I guess a risk is a risk when you don’t know what is going to happen. Trusting or maybe best of all having no attachment to the outcome is a better choice. This gives me the freedom to not have it turn out or be “right”. My process in this painting is one stroke at a time and the relationship to the last stroke or it’s surroundings. I believe I will reach a point where I won’t be lead but will lead, but right now I have to follow. As my son Blake would say at the end of every movie “to be continued”.

Evolution of a Self-Portrait

When I first started drawing on my iPod Touch in 2009, I fell in love with how quick and easy it was. There was no set-up, no clean-up, and I had an entire full-color, virtual studio in my pocket at all times. I could draw on the train, while waiting on line, whenever I came across something interesting in the world. The pieces I made on my Touch tended to be quick sketches, which took a lot less time than the work I was doing with traditional materials such as charcoal and acrylic paint.

Since then my use of mobile digital media has expanded to include drawing on my iPad, and the type of work I create has expanded to include quite detailed and time-consuming pieces, some of which now take much longer to create than my average traditionally-made piece. I do continue to go back and forth between ‘mobile digital’ (drawing on a mobile device such as phone, iPod or tablet) and traditional media, and I draw or paint, one way or another, every day.

In December of last year, I dug out my old watercolor pencils and crayons, because I’d been seeing some interesting work made with them by other artists on flickr. It had been at least a decade since I used them, so they were pretty much a new medium for me. As when starting to work with any new materials, I returned to a subject that was quite familiar to me – myself. Self-portraiture has been a recurring theme in my work, and for three years, from 3/15/2007 – 3/15/2010, I made a self-portrait every day.

Since I’m so familiar with the subject, I felt very comfortable exploring and experimenting with the media, and seeing what it could do. Watercolor pencils and crayons are water-soluble – you can draw with them and then add water to pull out washes. Depending on the mark you make, the paper you use, and the brand of pencil or crayon, you can have washes over your drawn marks, pull color from the drawn lines or from the crayon to create traditional washes, or draw more into the wet for very bold marks.

To learn the range of what they could do, I made a series of self-portraits on different papers, each taking only about 15 minutes.

Working back and forth as I do between digital and traditional media, I think alot about the similarities and differences both in results and in process. It’s hard to rework a watercolor once it’s dry (and even when it’s wet!), but of course digital media is infinitely malleable. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if I could resolve one of the watercolor self-portraits that I wasn’t satisfied with by transforming it to digital and re-working it. I also thought this would be quick, since I was going to base the digital piece on the already completed watercolor, and use digital methods to trace the watercolor and select colors from it.

Boy, was I wrong about that! The 15 minute watercolor turned into a digital piece that took more than 20 hours to complete. I’m glad I didn’t know that at the beginning!

I decided to go for a different look for the iPad version, and instead of using one of the Apps that tries to simulate watercolor, (such as Artrage or Auryn Ink), I chose the Typedrawing App. Typedrawing is an App that lets you draw, well, with type. You choose the letters, words, or phrases that constitute the marks you make while drawing.

Unexpectedly, drawing with type is rather like drawing with pastels. When you layer one color over another, you see the first color through the holes in the shapes of the type, much as you see one color below another when you draw on rough-textured paper with pastels.

In addition to choosing what words to draw with, you can set the font and size of the type. Or you can allow it to change fonts randomly as you draw, and have size change with the speed of your stroke, which is how I use it. With the latter option selected, you almost never have to go to a slider to change the size of the mark you are making. For small, detailed areas, you work slowly and it uses small type. When you’re filling in a large area, make quick strokes for larger type. Of all the apps I’ve tried, I have found this to be the best work around for the lack of pressure-sensitivity on the iPad. In fact, the range of stroke size from this method far surpasses what I used to get using a Wacom tablet and stylus with my desktop computer.

Although there are now some Apps that simulate mixing paint (Artrage, Wasabi immediately come to mind) or allow you to overlay colors to ‘mix’ via transparency (Brushes, Sketchbook Mobile, Art Studio and many others), one frustration for me drawing digitally has been the need to go to a color picker and try to find the color you need every time you want to change colors. It definitely interrupts the flow of drawing or painting more than reaching for a different pencil, or pulling some paint into a mix on your palette.

So another thing I really like about Typedrawing is that while you can draw in the usual way with a single color, you can also choose to draw with a range of colors. You can set sliders, for instance, to choose a range of dark, moderately saturated, blue-greens, and when you draw each letter will be a random color in that range.

This allows you to get alot of color in your image without having to go back and forth to the color wheel each time to select another color. I thought I would be using the range feature alot for this piece, but I ended up using a third method for choosing color – sampling directly from the imported image.

Sampling directly is sort of like using tracing paper in a traditional studio, but in addition to tracing the shape of the underlying image, you can also select the color from the original. When you are finished, you take away the original and have only the new image. I almost never work this way from photos, but I was willing to use this method to work from my own original artwork. So what could be quicker and easier? Select the color from the watercolor and trace over it.

The problem turned out to be that in the watercolor original, I generated alot of different colors by running washes into each other. And of course the color changes aren’t discrete areas, but continuous ranges from one color to another. There were very few areas that were one solid color. That meant I was constantly having to resample for every micro-stroke, to keep the colors as rich in the digital piece as in the original. To simulate the blends, I was also layering one sampled color over the other, and where the first color showed through the spaces in the letters of the second color, a sort of pointillist blending effect was created.

This process was definitely tedious, and I was glad I was working on it with my new Nomad Paintbrush Stylus. The Nomad Brush looks like a regular brush but has electronics in its bristles. This allows the iPad’s touchscreen to recognize and respond to it. I’ve tried a lot of styluses and always preferred drawing with my finger. However, the Nomad Brush was the first stylus to glide over the surface more smoothly than my finger, and to allow me to cover a larger area of the surface with less movement of my whole arm. Since this turned out to be a long piece, I was glad for anything that made it easier on my body to work on it.

Some areas of the painting were redrawn without major changes. However, the whole reason I was doing this was my dissatisfaction with the original, so I didn’t just want to copy it, but improve it. Therefore certain areas were completely redrawn. In those cases, I had to resist a lazy habit of digital to stick with the color I had selected, and continue to constantly change between alot of different, related colors, so the new areas would match the existing ones. Mostly, I continued to sample colors from the underlying image, but sometimes I used the color wheel to select adjacent colors.

Using the color wheel to select adjacent colors, colors which were similar but different enough to add richness to the image, got me looking at where the colors in my original were on the color wheel. I realized that if I were drawing from scratch on the iPad, without sampling, and wanted to choose some of the colors from my watercolor, I wouldn’t actually know where to find them on the color wheel. Of course I knew that where yellow and blue came together in a wash, I should look between them on the color wheel for green. But how about when mixing colors that weren’t adjacent? When mixing purple and orange, for instance, you get a very muted color which is… where exactly on the color wheel?

In all the color wheel examples shown, my eye thought the hue was different than it turned out to be. I also would not have predicted quite how unsaturated / close to grey all of these colors were. Although you could say I ‘cheated’ by selecting them out of the original instead of finding them manually, I used the opportunity to learn more about what I was seeing so that I could pick out such colors manually in the future.

How do you know when something is finished? Artists struggle with this question all the time. Some pieces reach a natural completion point, especially if the media is something like watercolor, where it can be tricky to re-work. Other media are more malleable. A piece reaches a stage you like – should you stop? If you continue you might overwork it or ruin it in some other way. Or you might greatly improve it. Deciding when to stop is an art you develop over time.

Digital media are the most malleable of all. Not only do you have the ability to cleanly undo and redo, but you can save stages of a piece as separate files so if you ‘ruin’ it, you can always go back to a previously saved version. Some think this flexibility prevents you from developing a sense of when to stop. I prefer, again, to take it as a learning experience. Since I don’t have to worry about ruining a piece, I can keep going and see what happens. This gives me information I can use in making decisions about pieces that aren’t as malleable. And I can decide after the fact which stage of the piece actually was final.

In this case, the watercolor came to a natural stop, but I did not feel the piece was complete; that’s why I started the Typedrawing version. It was my plan to redraw the entire face, but it seemed very strong to me about three quarters of the way through. I put that file aside and continued on for many more hours until the face was ‘complete’.

I used the ‘completed’ face to submit to the Nomad Brush contest as a portrait of myself as ‘Siri’, the voice that answers your questions on the latest iPhones. But I continued to look at both versions. Finally, I decided the ‘incomplete’ version was stronger, and that is the version I will exhibit in the future.

Artist Julia Kay works in traditional and digital media on a daily basis. Recurring themes in her work include the plant and animal kingdoms, portraiture and self-portraiture. To celebrate the completion of a three-year project in which she drew herself every day, she started Julia Kay’s Portrait Party (JKPP). JKPP is an international collaboration of more than 650 artists from more than 50 countries who have made more than 20,000 portraits of each other in less than two years.

Underneath

I know you must be wondering, why the name “Underneath” and how does it relate to this painting? Well, color is my language. It speaks in layers, vibrancy, tones, subtleties and more. Color reflects my mood, passion, feelings and desires. It is limitless in regards to what color expresses for me. So as the many layers of color and the color selection and well as the movement in the painting, it tells me subliminaly what is going on “underneath” the surface. I also wonder if the colors I chose correlate to the chakras in my body. It tells me what energies I should notice, as well as a way I need to balance and release. Wassily Kandinsky elaborated on color in his book “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” He talked about how certain colors can represent certain instruments, as well as a reflection of our soul.

When I painted this painting yesterday, I felt such a need to lay down color, I know that it was necessary for my well-being and expression to pull what was underneath the layers of my body, mind and soul, and transform it. Color becomes the alchemy from my spirit to the physical world.

This is my twelfth painting of my #paint52 challenge to paint 52 paintings this year. The painting measures 6-3/4″ X 10″, Atelier Acrylic on velum and is also for sale for $150.00, contact me if you are interested.(Painting now sold) Your support has been wonderful and I am so grateful, thank you!