Closing the Year

2012 is fast headed out the door, and 2013 looms before us!

This has been a large year for me on the art front because, while I've been selling professionally since 2001, I shut down every other business and idea outside of art this year and committed to it 100% by June. I shut the doors on my photography business in May when it became clear that both businesses were heating up and requiring too much to allow both to survive, and that's when I made the final decision to finally say yes to the paint.  (Want to know more about my art-business path? I was invited to talk about it in a guest post here.)

I even figured out how to make a time-lapse video of my paintings (I made three, actually!)

I also learned that I can make a video blog (vlog?) from my phone, and tried it out:

I plan on actually doing more of those vlogs (and decorating my studio a bit more, because it looks depressingly stark on the video! I should add that my house is vibrant everywhere else, and I think I removed the color from everything in there so mine would be the focus when I added it to the canvases!) And I hear tell that some artists are trying art-meet-ups via Skype or other video chatting, and I'm interested in giving that a go... if I can get over my shyness, and find others who want to chat while we work!

I have a lot of goals for 2013, and I'm looking forward to a year filled with paint and opportunities! I'm going to make it a goal to finish a painting a week. Sure, my larger paintings take more time (months and months in some cases) but I promise to take the time to work on some smaller, faster ones as well. Allowing for some sick and vacation time, that means about 48-50 new paintings next year!

I'm going to tighten back up my sketching skills so I jump forward in other ways. I used to work solely in pencil, not even color. I remember working so hard in high school on detail that I made a picture of my hand that looked like a black and white photograph when I was finished (boring, but all about the detail - composition didn't matter then.) Once I achieved that, I wanted a new challenge, and that was color. I slid first to acrylics and I didn't like the results, so I backtracked and went heavy with chalk pastels. For some reason, color meant more about expression than detail, and I loosened up in order to allow for that.

Eventually I conquered the paint, and my tight detail rendering slid into the shadows as I learned I just needed the basic outlines for painting, and the detail came from the paint instead. It's time to revisit the detail and work on crossing it with the color - in particular with watercolors, where the details count in the pencil rendering. This will make my "painting a week" more achievable, because watercolor just works a bit faster than acrylic or oils for me.

Speaking of oils, they're coming out this year. I miss the depth! I plan on using them for any people I paint, because it just looks better to me. It's going to be tough waiting for the oils to try as the trade-off, but it'll be worth it. I'll still work in acrylics as well, though.

Lastly, I'm going to continue working on my fairytale series, but I'm also resurrecting my abstracts and surreal body of work (I had pulled them from my site when I did a major revamp almost two years ago, I think.) I'm going to be offering some prints of the older ones, and new ones are already lining up for the easel! Also, this work dovetails nicely with THRICE Fiction Magazine, where I have been lucky enough to be asked contribute artistically, along with other talented artists and writers.

I'm thankful to all who have supported my art, as well as those who have found a piece they like and took it into their homes! It's been a huge 2012 for me, and I'm looking forward to 2013! I hope you had a wonderful year, and have a fabulous 2013!