Beantime's Weblog

Signing Artwork and Prints – Who Knew??

beantime — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 18:37:17 +0000

As I’ve improved in my botanical work, I’ve been curious about how I might eventually create prints or cards from some of my works. A couple of months back, I completed a botanical that I thought would be a good one to use in exploring this next step.

When I finished my picture, I signed it and sent it off to be scanned and to get a couple of giclee prints made which I’d hoped to eventually gift or sell.

The ~~good~~ great news is that I actually SOLD a print…and to someone who wasn’t a friend or relative.

What I didn’t know at the time was that there were many other steps that I should have thought through before I started selling prints. Here are a couple of things I learned…

Think about how you’re signing your original. Do you want your signature to be bold or discreet on the original. Are you going to sign the print too? Are you signing it in a way that would make a second signature look redundant?

I not only signed my original in a not too discreet way…but also way off to the side. I’m not sure why I did that! And when it came to the print, I didn’t sign it. I didn’t know that you should. But had I signed it, I think it might have looked a little redundant.

2. If you are making prints, particularly giclee prints, are there a limited number of prints you’ll make? You should think about that. Giclee prints are not just ‘copies’ of the original.

I didn’t even think about the numbering I see on prints (“1/250″ for example). The numbering tells the buyer how many are out there or expected to be out there. It would have been nice to give my buyer print number 1! But I didn’t even sign the print, let alone number it.

My botanical instructor, Jeanne Debons, has helped me understand print numbering a bit more. You can order prints as you need them, but you need to keep track of what number you are on. If I had done prints that were, say, in a series of 25, and I reached number 25, that’s it! It wouldn’t be right for me to start another ‘series’ of the same print. Having said that…if you really think it will sell, don’t limit your series to something small like 25. Maybe make them x of 250 or x of 500

So…I redid the signature on the original in a more discreet place.

…got the original rescanned, and got new giclee prints made. I will sign and number my prints going forward, starting with #2 because I’m going to track down my first buyer and give her a ‘correct’ #1 print! And I know that my work is still improving, so I’m going to limit this beet series to 50.

I am sure there are still many other points I’ve yet to consider, but this is a learning experience for me and I welcome your feedback!

And here’s the beet!

beta Vulgaris

You Tell Me…

beantime — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 15:38:39 +0000

We got a new (slightly used) border collie mix a few months back…about the time I last posted. Her name is Polly, and she’s amazing!

More than one person has told me that she looks like Scrat from Ice Age. You tell me…

Scout passed away one day last summer (acute arrhythmia). We miss her and talk about her often. We’re also very glad to have a new friend in the house.

pencils down…for a minute

beantime — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 21:39:04 +0000

I have been loving exploring colored pencils and learning more about how, when used correctly, they can give an illustration that watercolor look. I love this because I’VE ALWAYS HATED working with watercolor. It’s the most unforgiving medium I know of.
After looking at a lot of botanicals though, I see that watercolor is the medium of choice. Hmm…
Last weekend I decided to face two of my fears head on – driving in the snow alone all of the way over the hill to Bend, Oregon (fear #1) to attend a two-day botanical painting workshop in watercolor (fear #2).
The snow was a cake walk, and the workshop was a blast! Jeanne Debons is a botanical artist and instructor who lives in Bend. One of the classes she leads is a two-day workshop in the fundamentals of botanical painting in watercolor.
I attended the class with three others – all at varying skill levels, but all well above me. No problemo – I was there to learn
Jeanne started me on a reintroduction to painting shapes – spheres, cones and rods…enough to learn how to shade, and ‘move paint around’.

painting shapes

First thing I learned:
I learned that not only is it OK for watercolors to touch one another (I always thought that was a no-no), but that layering the color is what gives depth and luminosity to a painting. (maybe this is just so for botanicals – not sure).
Once I practiced a bit I moved on to my piece! A pepper. I had to sketch it, and then use that sketch as a base for a more detailed picture showing the shading. Then that piece was what I referred to as I painted. My pepper started out pretty lame though.
Second thing I learned:
Paintings go through a phase Jeanne calls adolescence. In this phase paintings look awkward, and you often want to pitch it, but they’ll grow out of this phase as you continue working with them.. An earlier me would have thought this concept hokey, but I saw it firsthand and its true! The eggplant in the first pic up top is still in its adolescent phase.

Painting a pepper

I worked on my little pepper for the rest of day 1 and a LOT of day 2. Sure enough – it started to come together. It’s not a perfect pepper, but I learned a lot in painting it.

Here’s my pepper after about 2 hours.

pepper after about 2 hours work

and here’s the same pepper after about 4 or hours:

pepper after about 4-5 hours work

The third thing I learned was:
patience.

I came home and continued practicing. This little tangerine has taken me three days!

watercolor tangerine

Evolution of my colored pencil swatches

beantime — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 23:10:10 +0000

My early attempts at color matching were done by holding pencils up to the flower or plant that I was drawing, leaning in close and then closing one eye to get the most accurate read possible. What I thought was color matching was really just guessing… So I read about using color swatches – I know! Duh!

On a swatch I drew the pencil light to hard to see the full range of a color. That along with the name/number of the color created the swatch.

pencil swatch the 'old' way

An artist friend of mine helped me see that this swatch, while an improvement over eyeballing it, still wasn’t ideal because on my swatch the colors were too close together and so each color was influencing the one butted up next to it. Also, how was I to add colors to my swatch as I got more pencils? Hmm…

So now the new swatch looks like this:

color swatches the 'new' way

These new swatches still show the same information for each pencil but, being individual cards, they can be seen without their neighboring color interfering. This swatch can also be added to easily with each new pencil I get! Much better!

color swatch success!

Thanksgiving Bagel Feast!

beantime — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 22:13:28 +0000

This is our second year of a new tradition – bagels, cream cheese, lox and capers for Thanksgiving breakfast. This breakfast creates no mess in the kitchen, few dishes and full bellies to hold us until dinner (we’re lunch skippers on this day…).
Yesterday I did all of my shopping a little late and the bagel store was already closed. Oh no! I would have to make bagels. So much for not messing up the kitchen. I found a good recipe on food.com – The Real New York Bagel Recipe and followed it pretty well.

NY Bagels (makes a dozen)

Last night I made a sponge which sits for 2 hours until you get little bubbles in the dough (tells you its rising). I used 1 tsp active dry yeast, 4 cups bread flour and 2 cups water…. I waited for 2 hours…no bubbles…another half hour…no bubbles…another….hmm. Turns out you need to ‘activate’ active dry yeast in a little warm water. Once its a little frothy you can use it.
I tossed the first batch and started again.
New York Bagels- take 2!
This sponge looked much better – so active!

bagel sponge

Next I put it in the stand mixer and put 3 more cups of bread flour, another 1/2 tsp of yeast (activated – fool me once!), 2 tsp salt and a Tbsp of brown sugar (other recipes as for malt…but this was the only recipe that called for something already in my house – just to give you some insight into my recipe selection process process).

After 5 minutes of mixing, I chopped it into 12 pieces and then covered with plastic wrap again to let the dough recover from being thrown about.

Half an hour later I took each piece and poked a hole in the middle of it and twirled it around my index finger like a little finger hula hoop. Voila – it looks like a bagel!

I let the little rings rest up again and stuck the whole thing in the fridge until this morning.

Today this went sooo fast! I boiled water with 1 Tbsp baking soda and dropped these doughy bagels in the water for 2-3 minutes (flipping them halfway thru). They got all puffy and wow!

Next they all went on a cookie sheet and baked at 450 for something like 30 minutes. Well, the recipe said 5 minutes…then another 5-10 minutes…but mine took much longer bit longer because I was opening the door way too often for the oven to stay hot).

Bad over door habits and rookie yeast move aside, the kitchen now has this tangy, doughy smell, the windows are steamed up, and we have bagels!

botanical art for beginners

beantime — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 00:19:43 +0000

I got hooked on colored pencils on my last vacation. I painted a red onion and was surprised at how well the color came out even though I’d blended a bazillion colors together. This wouldn’t happen with paint. With paint, too many colors always turns into mud.
I looked around online for some instruction and found the amazing Ann Swan. She’s not only a great botanical artist, but she also describes her craft in a way that a novice like myself can digest.
I read the articles on her website and purchased her book, Botanical Portraits with Colored Pencils.
I spent the day today drawing my neighbors rose hip plant. This took me about 4 hours total.

1. asked the neighbor if i could pick these rose hips. I can’t really draw from a photo as well as I can from a real plant. Photos lack something – depth? not sure what it is – but when I draw from a photo it looks flat.

rosehips

2. did a loose sketch. this was hard because with botanical art I guess you’re supposed to try to draw things true to size. There are probably exceptions to that, but I’m new to this so I don’t know all the rules.

first sketch of rosehips

3. shaded with grey colored pencils. I had no idea this was a step! apparently it’s a very important one. I’m new to this, ok? Don’t roll your eyes.

first layer is grey shading

4. layer colored pencil over this now… wowza. shading in grey first made such a difference!

shading with greens...

...and reds...

5. after I colored in the rest I used a blending pencil. its like a colored pencil with no color. it smushes the colored pencil into the paper more so that it looks, well, blended. it is supposed to look more like paint when you do this…but mine looks like pencil still. I’m sure there’s something I’m not understanding about that step…but I was still happy with the outcome – Rosehips Neighborus

rosehips

Here comes the fruit!

beantime — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 00:44:54 +0000

It’s official! We’ve got yard food! First, we’ve got a great Italian plum tree and the plums on it are mere HOURS away from being ripe enough to eat.

This plum is about the size of a raquetball...kid you not.

By the end of the summer I’ll probably know a million ways to prepare Italian plums because I’ll have thousands of them (I can actually hear them dropping on the ground outside right now) but for starters I might make the Plum Cake Tatin from Barfoot in Paris.

Just across the yard from the plum tree is our first ever tomato plant. We opted for a single cherry tomato plant, just to wade into the water. Most of the tomatoes are still green, but the other morning I saw this little guy!

the first tomato

The nice thing about cherry tomatoes is that for a while at least we’ll just be able to pop them on salads. If we get overrun with them later, we can freeze them and add them to warm dishes in the winter and reminisce about our first summer garden

Squirrel!

beantime — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 15:53:10 +0000

I stopped into Cline Glass looking for a stained glass lampshade. Turns out they don’t sell those there, but they do sell glass to people who make stained glass lampshades and they do offer classes to people who might want to learn stained glass so that they can eventually make their own stained glass lampshades.

Interesting.

So I started the class in late June. 3 hours a night once a week where we learned to cut, grind, foil, flux, solder and, oh yes, bleed.

On the first night of class we just practiced cutting random pieces of glass, which sounds easy, but there’s a finesse to it that apparently you acquire over time…

Be careful! This stuff is sharp!

While I cut my finger three times that night, it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience! At the end of the night I had successfully cut out glass using my practice pattern (note piece #5 in the pattern – it comes up again):

practice pattern

The next class was where we picked our projects. I picked a cute, but rather complicated squirrel pattern. It was 25 pieces, lots of curves, and not a realistic pick for a first project. But, my sweet, squirrel-loving dog had just passed the weekend before and when I saw that pattern I thought it a sign from BEYOND that I was meant to make the squirrel. My instructor, Becky, was probably reluctant to talk me out of using that pattern because I was a little weepy when I told her why I chose it.

Cut..cut…grind…grind… With laser focus I cut out my little squirrel parts. I did not cut my finger even once.

Here is a picture of all of the pieces after I cut them. Remember piece # 5 in my practice pattern? That’s a complicated cut (for a newbie) and similar to my squirrel arm. It took me SIX times to cut it out without breaking the arm off in the process!

squirrel cuts

In the last class we took our foiled projects and soldered them. And I got to walk out of class with my first finished stained glass piece! Ta-dah!

Squirrel!

Cime di licious!

beantime — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:53:48 +0000

When friends go out of town you graciously step up to feed the cat, take in the mail, etc. Little did we know that one of our ‘tasks’ was to take the farm fresh veggies our friends get delivered and use them ourselves!
I have always wondered what these basket of treats would be like. Would it just be something like 12 pounds of chard? Well… happy to say it was fabulous! The best part is that you often don’t know how to cook what you get – so, you get to learn something new. Believe me – something new in the kitchen is ALWAYS appreciated.
Our particular basket of goodies came from Pumpkin Ridge Gardens. They offer a subscription service for veggies direct from their farm – located just outside of Portland.
I knew most of the goodies in the basket by sight (though the kale had me stumped until I looked at the sheet that came with the basket). The other I still couldn’t wrap my mind around even after reading its name ‘cime di rapa’
A quick Google and I found several recipes. Most were around a dish that had cime di rapa/ orecchiette pasta as the two ingredients. All recipes said that the stems were blech. so…here’s my take!
1. Get the cime di rapa on a cutting board so you can cut it from the stems!

2. Put the pasta on and then put the cime di rapa in with the boiling pasta (towards the last 6 minutes or so…) – This step felt wrong but it worked!

3. In a saute pan put some garlic cloves and a little red peper flakes.
4. Then put the strained pasta/cime di rapa in the saute pan too! (wait! that’s not orechiette! I know, right? I only had some rigatoni around but it was good!)

5. grate a little romano over the top and serve!

This was so easy and delicious!

What have we here?

beantime — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 01:03:03 +0000

A couple of weeks back I purchased three interesting arts & crafts frames.

They had neat old pictures from Venice, Italy, but I really just wanted the frames…so I set about taking the pictures out..which involved pulling old rusty nails from the back that had been there for maybe 80 years?…
When I got the pictures out I found these painted boards which were used to hold the photos in place!

and the last one which is the most complete and has a date – 1902.

So now I am so interested!! Where are these from? They’re all different views of the same crest. ‘l’union fait la force’ (strength through unity) is the motto for Belgium and the lion is like a Belgian lion…but its wearing a little crest of its own which I can’t place. Also, the right side of the crest has a LOT of different things on it… what does it mean? so fun trying to figure this out any ideas?