Moving Right Along

Ophelia is moving right along and I have two more progress pictures to share. I've paingted in her hand, the robin and her hair; I've also given her a dark red dress to compliment the warm red on the robin's breast.

Portable Oil Palette

Materials

Process

The best palette surface for oil paint is glass and the cheapest way to get a nice oil palette is to get a glass frame from a place like Walgreens (don't waste your money on special oil paint glass palettes). After squeezing out all your colors and mixing your paint just the way you want it, the last thing you should do after a day of painting is scrape off all your excess expensive oil paint and throw it away or have it sit idle and start drying until you paint again. To preserve your muy presioso oil paint, carefully put your palette in the freezer to freeze the paint, then thaw it before painting again (this will slow down the drying process considerably).

Now, it doesn't take long for an artist to realize that storing and transporting an oil palette is a hassle; when you store it in the freezer, the oil paint can get on your food and you need to make sure you have enough room to store it flat. There are special storing palettes for acrylic paint, but—as far as I can tell—there are only messy, non-convenient options for oil paint. Enter my portable oil paint palette.

This post will show you how to make your own, relatively inexpensive oil paint freezer palette.

Materials

You will need:

• Large, plastic scrapbook box (or if you want something small, a plastic snap-lid pencil box)
• Two 8"x10" cheap front-loading glass frames (I found mine at Walgreens—they're called Format, made by MCS) . If you want to make a small palette case, get the 4"x6" frames.
• A metallic Sharpie, or something that can mark on black plastic.
• Eight 1/2" machine screws with nuts.
• Phillips-head screwdriver for the machine screws.
• Sharp, round file suitable for poking holes through thick plastic.
  

Process

Step 1

Take the two frames apart and with the metallic Sharpie mark the insides of the frames directly in the middle of each side. Then, with the sharp metal file, poke holes through the frames where marked (I only had to poke two holes per frame because the frames I used already had two holes in them for hanging).

Step 2

Center each of the two frames inside the lid and the bottom of the box and mark their position through the holes with the metallic sharpie.Then, poke holes through the box where you marked the placement of the frames.

Step 3

Once there are holes in the frames and in the box, screw the machine screws through the holes into the box. Then take the screws out and do the same with the frames. This will ensure that the holes are large enough to accommodate the screws and make threads in the plastic that the screws can follow.

Step 4

Once you make sure the screws can go through the holes, line up the frames' holes with the box's holes and from the outside of the box, drive the screws into the box and frames. Screw the accompanying machine screw nuts onto the end of the screws to secure the frames to the box (you don't want your frames to fall out when you have all your paint on them!).

Step 5

Replace the paper and glass into the frames (flipping the paper around to have a tan or gray surface showing).

Conclusion

...And that's it! You have a portable palette you can throw into the freezer or transport without a big messy paint hassle.

Please let me know if any of this didn't make sense and feel free to tweak as necessary.

New Year, New Work

There is no end to my resolutions this year and one of many is the dedication to paint more. I am currently working on two—soon three—paintings and have a few ideas of sculptures I want to carve. I hit the ground running at the beginning of this new year: I resolved to get paperwork in order to officially start my own business, which I believe I will call RLM Studio (or something like that), I am working with a new website client, and I have decided to go back to school in the fall semester for a computer science class and another foreign language (I'm leaning towards Arabic). I still ultimately want to become an art professor, but I want to expand my horizons before I narrow them; I want to build a stable financial foundation before I tackle such a challenging task. Plus, I really enjoy working on websites—they provide endless mind puzzles, which I adore.

Art is still my heart's passion, but there is always time for art if you make time (sorry Facebook games, I've got better things to do). The first painting I'm working on has been around for a while collecting dust because I wasn't very happy with it, but the other day I looked at it again and decided to salvage it. The subject is about bird nest soup, which comes from the actual nests of swifts—not swallows—as sometimes it's called "swallow's nest." Although I hear it's very healthy, I'm averse to the idea of eating regurgitated nest material. In the painting, I felt to express my uneasiness by playing with the idea of a bird nesting in a person's open mouth.

The next painting's imagery has been stewing in my mind for about a year. The subject matter is simple and is comprised of a Japanese Shinto gateway (seen from a low angle) with birds sitting on it and flying over it. I am not sure it will work as a painting, but it made a really nice little relief print. I've always been fascinated with the Shinto belief of birds being the messengers between this world and the next. The gateway marks the divide between the ordinary world and the sacred, and since birds are the messengers, it's natural to find them at that divide. In fact, the Japanese call the gates "torii" and the word for bird is "tori." It has been said that the gate also functions as a type of glorified bird perch (I can't remember where I read this, please correct me if I'm wrong).

I've included pictures of both the works-in-progress in this post. Hopefully they come out as well as the imagery I'm imagining (crossing fingers).

End of Summer

I was never very good at keeping a journal or a sketchbook. I know I should keep a sketchbook, but that is just how some artists work...
Anyway, it has been over a year since I posted anything and it's high time I made some use out of this blog.

Classes begin at the University of Arizona on August 25th- my last semester before getting an official BFA and two minors in Japanese and Business Administration! Picking what graduate schools I want to go to is hard because I'm one of those people who tends to grow emotionally and physically attached to my location. I'm very attached to Tucson, but I will have to transplant myself sometime soon- I'm excited, but I'm also very scared. Some places I'm looking into are Northern Arizona State University, Arizona State University, and Laguna College of Art and Design. Laguna is expensive, but I'm hoping to find financial aid; I love the work that comes out of that school and they take a representational approach to their subjects. I'm a believer in learning all the representational rules before breaking and manipulating them.

In regards to my website, I have finally updated it after more than a year. I didn't mess with it for a while because I was having problems uploading my files to my server- but all is well and up to date now.

Right now I'm working on a series of paintings about the Japanese Shinto gateway called a "torii." I am fascinated with this structure because of its associations with birds (if you can't tell from my artwork, I love birds...) and its being a division between this world and the spiritual world. Shinto is a very interesting religion and if I were a more decisive individual, I would probably like to be a shintoist. Back to the series- I have ideas about depicting different toriis out of various materials and in an environment corresponding to its material and the style of the torii. I will include pictures and attempt to fully describe my ideas in a different post.

I have discovered the addictive world of Facebook, and I can now be found in its crowd of lethargic individuals. I was never a follower of very popular things, but I have found Facebook to be a good way to establish and strengthen relationships and display artwork- anything which will help me get my art out there works for me!