The Current Painting: PaintWorks 73-91733, "Summer Farm", Plate 3

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The progress has placed, now, a charming and nifty rock wall in the forefront of the painting. This took more than an evening because, first, there are so many little tiny regions to cover, miss, remix paint and return to, and second, I embrace this because it is very much a healing meditation.

It is, as all PaintWorks projects do, shaping up nicely, no?

Also want to mention that Princeton Art & Brush's "Snap!" value-priced line of brushes is the aspiring-artist-on-a-budget's best friend. Oh, I've said that before?

Well, it still holds true.

I finally got me a van Gogh pocket watercolor box and an water-brush pen for doing watercolors. It's a bit late, though, so I'm going to hold off on that until tomorrow. 

The Current Painting: PaintWorks 73-91733, "Summer Farm", Plates 1 and 2

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We have been getting back into painting, and PaintWorks' PBNs are always, always ready to go and great fun and much detail.

I've started one titled "Summer Farm", number 73-91733. 

This is plates 1 and 2 of progress on the bucolic scene.

The old truck emerges from the horse pasture it's abandoned in and doing all that foliage painting is great fun, very therapeutic. We need much therapy around here in the art way.

Painting a Busy Thing

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Painting is a thing that's happening here, as I prepare to dive back into freeform painting and paint an elephant (all in due time, Grasshopper) and I'm doing another PaintWorks work called By The Harbor. in the foreground, an overstuffed antique store on a pier, its charming contents spilling out; beyond, the aforementioned harbor, a schooner moving along through

There is a riot of flowers hanting over the scene. They are a busy, busy thing to paint.

In one of those touches so charmingly PaintWorks, the instructions invite you to personalize the picture if you so feel moved to do so by painting over the outlined words on the panel and painting your own words on the sign.

It still seems liberating the way a programmed activity, paint by numbers, is very subtly subverted by this manufacturer. You can go with the lines and disregard the little techniques and it's still pretty neat when it's done, or you can dance with the techniques and go outside the envelope a little and it's a creative artistic adventure. 

That's why I love this brand so much. You can have your paint-by-number your way, if you want.

Veranda PBN Progress, Plate 1

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The first step, as I've said before, in completing a PaintWorks project, is to cover the black area and then the gray area.

I don't know if that's best practices or not, but they are the most optically-attractive part of the design, and compel me to go there first. Tonight, I covered the black areas (leaning over to check if I've closed the black paint pot, yes, yes, I did).

And thinking of the parenthetical in the statement above makes me want to point out one of the ways in which PaintWorks quality really shines out. These are acrylic paints, as are the vast majority of PBN kits you'll find today (when I was a kid they were as likely as not oil paints, as some of my stained shirts of the time would attest). Acrylics are versatile, mix handily, give themselves to a bunch of effects that look like watercolor or oil, but they dry quick, yo, and once they do, they're literally a sort of plastic. You can't thin them down or reuse them like watercolors.

I've lost at least one PBN paint pot this way. Forgetting to cap your paint at the end of a sesh might just cost you that pot. In the pot, though, PW paints dry slow enough that if you leave it uncapped overnight, you won't necessarily lose that color. You do have to put some water in there, thin it out, and make sure you cap it; dry acrylic paint is dry acrylic paint. But, you leave this open overnight, you don't necessarily lose it.

Don't take that for granted though. Like I just day, dry acrylic paint is dry acrylic paint. I have a paint morguefile, but not everyone does. Be careful about this. 

The New PBN: PaintWorks 79-91437, Veranda, Dempsey Essick

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We parked on the downhill when completing Cat Signs, so we shall proceed with velocity into the next project. 

Allow me to introduce you to PaintWorks #97-91437, Veranda, design credited to on Dempsey Essick. The box perforce:

The scene suggests something of the atmosphere of Dixie, a hint of genteel living with the horse and buggy in the distance in the trees on the right.

There's something to that Southern note. The artist, Dempsey Essick, is based in Lexington, North Carolina. The artist's (who retired in 2015) work sounds a long, warm note featuring hummingbirds and other flying critters, serene rural scenes and pastoral Southern buildings lushly attended by the foliage one expects to find near them. 

Here, now, on my much-beloved palette, the 18 colors that come with the set, in the wonderfully-designed PaintWorks pots. I love this design; easy to find colors, easy to keep organized. Also the brush which, while of a higher quality than most PBN kits you'll find, still doesn't quite satisfy; I use my own, usually a #2 round for acrylics and watercolors. I've found the most satisfaction with the "Gray Matter" brand, for what that's worth.

And last, but not least, the piece itself, the panel ready to accept the paint. 20-by-14, standard for PaintWorks' larger pieces; as usual, what stands out are the areas where black is supposed to go, and the gray areas where the secondary color note will be placed.

The deck area of the veranda I'm anticipating with both excitement and trepidation. There the borders between the colors is dotted, calling for drybrushing for creating soft blends between the colors, and this really creates the effect of a shiny, painted deck. I have so far struggled with drybrushing so I'm looking forward to confronting this and making a real effort to master the technique here.

Also note the wide-open unnumbered area on that deck. Unnumbered areas usually mean you're going to paint them white (sometimes what's unnumbered on the panel is numbered on the diagram due to space and clarity issues, so confirming on the diagram is always essential) and that's just what's going to happen here. I will, however, not be applying the white; as I learned long ago, when you're painting in acrylic or watercolor, the white of the paper or panel is almost always sufficient. It simplifies things, and also demands a certain amount of caution; the fix for accidentally painting the area may mean you have to paint that area white anyway to make it look totally right. 

The color approach and theme of the piece is something outside of what I usually like to go for, so this is a little outside my comfort zone, but it's exciting and as a completed piece, should like quite lovely.

So, on we go. 

Cat Signs PBN Progress, Plate 6 and Final

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This is it, the end product of the PaintWorks kit 73-91655, Cat Signs:

You want to pet the cat, don't you? Of course you do.

Now, on to the next person, place, or thing. 

Cat Signs PBN Progress, Plate 5

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This is Cat Signs at the closing bell this morning. 

It's all starting to feel quite cosy (I'm choosing the British spelling for reasons) isn't it? The Craven "A" sign and the wood of the wall in back generate quite a bit of warmth.

Just the quilt in the SE corner and the outside-the-window in the NW to go. That NW corner I'm going to take a bit of care with, as there is, yes, yet again, my old nemesis, dry-brushing to be done there. But I approach the challenge with joy and a sense of adventure. 

Cat Signs PBN Progress, Plates 3 and 4

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This last weekend was a busy one, in the way that a work colleague who's healing up from a serious injury had to call out twice and I wound up working one 11-hour day and one 10-hour day on very short notice and I didn't even feel like doing much reading or writing so I got up to the PBN easel and filled in some more color ...

... and it felt good. 

These are the last two checkpoints on Cat Signs, and the whole thing is coming together with a shout, I must say.

In the first one, plate 3, I begin filling in the labels on the old boxes that support the box the fuzzbutt is smugly reclining in. 

I can also tell now that this is a very British shorthair. How? Google makes it easy. Googling Craven "A" Cigarettes and Pelaw tell me that both brands are British with a long history of popularity. The tobacco brand, Wikipedia tells me, was manufactured in Britain by a subsidiary of British American Tobacco, and, Wikipedia also tells me, the founder of Pakistan smoked 50 per day even when ill with tuberculosis, and Charles deGaulle rather fancied them after being deprived of his usual brand during exile in World-War-Deuce. 

It also tells me it was named after the third Earl of Craven, though not why. 

I also gather that Pelaw is a brand of polishes that have been around for a very very long time. I've found references to metal polish and shoe polish and it was apparently quite beloved for a very long time.

I know not what the Lyons' refers to.

After detailing the labels under the moggy we turn the corner and begin filling in the quilt int he corner and the tools and tool-shed impedimenta in the northeast corner of the panel. It's at that point the work really starts to pop for me and take on that impression of space and volume, that magic moment in doing these that I love so much. 

Gonna enter the home stretch very soon now. 

Cat Signs PBN Progress, Plate 2

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It was my goal to fill in the kitty cat in the picture. 

Mission: accomplished. 

Beatific smile, scritchable fur, ears that beg for fondling, boopable nose; it's all there. The colors are very well designed here; the lighter colors aren't too far apart from each other but have enough contrast to produce that beloved tabby pattern. The darkest color, a very very shaded brown, gives the perfect counterpoint to the light cream and buff colors. It's a pleasure, this cat.

Where they fits, they sits; if you don't have scritches or treats, it's OK, make an appointment for later and they will pencil you in if you promise to have the proper accessories at that time.

Cat Signs PBN Progress, Plate 1

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This is the first stage of Cat Signs: 

The PaintWorks paintings, as usual, start with the black areas colored black (and those are psychologically attractive so I did that first) then the next dominant color, in gray. That, this time, was a mustard-golden-yellow, and we could predict, if we hadn't first looked at the picture on the box, that this was going to predominate in warm, happy tones. 

The lovely vintage typography, labelling,and signage is already evident. 

Happy PBN Birthday To Me

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The Brown Eyed Girl knows me and knows me well. Although I sometimes feel that, in doing my art projects, I'm her art project.

Like I'd mind. She gets me to become the person she sees, I get to play with paint and (pandemic allowing) go to art supply stores, which are pretty much the happiest places on earth. Sounds like a win-win.

It has just been my nth birthday (where n=a number from 1-100 inclusive, though realistically, it's not, say, 14) and when I got home from work, there was this glandularly-large box-shaped thing on the table, and when I got to open it, it was not one thing ... but eight things. Here are those things.

... all the Dimensions PaintWorks PBN project kits I could want for a while. These are simple-yet-involved works which require a bit of time to complete, hard working art working just the way I like it to. As I've pointed out before, I am in love with this brand because it lets you get as sophisticated as you want: the picture on the outside doesn't show the idealized result, it shows the picture as you'll actually complete it, and by introducing you to painterly techniques such as feathering, stippling, and drybrushing, makes it so that you can achieve effects that make them look a bit more than the sum of their parts.

Or you can just skip the fancy-pants painterly stuff and it still looks danged good completed.

I can't say enough nice things about the PaintWorks approach. I just wish there were more of them.

On to the easel.

PBN Progress Report: Isn't It Romantic?

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Last issue, I mentioned returning to PBNs to keep my artistic somatic work going. Used a little clip of what I was working on. But here's the whole thing, in three stages for work-so-far:

When I abandoned it then picked it up again, here's the state:

Pretty subdued and earthy-toned so far. But then more colors come in ...

The fancifulness of the colors begins to really blossom and shine.

The title is Isn't It Romantic?, and I've got to say it is, with the warmth and fantasy is supported by the palette. I'm enjoying it.

The Daily Paint By Number: Selected "Echo Bay" Progress Photos

3588Very recently I completed yet another PaintWorks PBN project, Darrel Bush's "Echo Bay" (#73-91474). I generated an armful of progress photos and want to share them all here, but 24 graphics is a bit much, so here, hopefully thoughtfully curated, is a reduced selection of that.

I may have duplicated one or two or put one or two out of order. I'll fix that later.