"You're Fired!" Thank Goodness!

"Huntley" one of my early pet portraits

If  you've ever been through this ordeal, you know that being fired from a job can be a humiliating and demoralizing experience. But, sometimes it turns out to be the best thing that could have happened to you. 

Right out of art school I got a job with a billboard company as a keyliner. As it turned out the job entailed more than that. My boss also gave me billboard design jobs to do along with the keylines for billboards. Keylines are boards that contain the type and artwork that are used by the painters when sizing up the designs onto huge billboard panels to be painted. Everything has to be accurate and precise because any tiny mistake on the keyline is magnified many times on the huge billboard panels. 

Designing and doing the layouts is much more exciting and rewarding. We were given a few guidelines, like the text to be included and the images wanted and then it was up to us to arrange everything in an eye catching design. A billboard has three seconds to grab the attention of drivers passing by. We used a type setting machine for the type and created color layouts of the designs using markers, just as I had been taught in art school. I loved working with markers.

There were only three of us in the art department in a tiny upstairs studio at Dingeman Advertising in Traverse City. We listened to NPR on the radio a lot, and I particularly remember one day listening to a reading of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" as we worked. It was one of those mesmerizing magic moments that you never forget. 

It came as a shock, then, when my boss's boss instructed her to fire me for being too slow. It wasn't that it wasn't deserved and that I hadn't been warned, but it was still a shock. 

It took me maybe half a day to get over the shock and to embrace a new way forward. Being fired gave me the freedom to do freelance design work which quickly broadened into a pet portrait business. 

When I returned to riding after a thirty year absence and bought a horse, pet portraits expanded into horse portraits. It wasn't long before I was creating equine fine art too, going to horse shows and horse expos with my booth and entering juried art shows. The rest is history, as they say. 

After several years of doing freelance design work, I realized it wasn't where my heart was nor where I was most skilled. I gave it up and concentrated on using my graphic design skills to design my  own marketing materials and a website for the fine art business. 

"Lavender Light" a college art still life

If I hadn't been fired all those years ago, all of this might not have happened, or at least it would have been delayed for who knows how long. So, today I am grateful for being let go from a job that I wasn't suited for in the first place. Today I celebrate my long career as a fine artist and occasional illustrator. 

Today I am fulfilled.

"Echo", a Horse Drawing

"Echo" a Quarter Horse Mare

Drawing from the photograph

I saw a woolly caterpillar in the barn aisle the other day, and that is a sure sign that Fall is here and winter is on its way. 

Usually, Fall is very busy at our house as we batten down the hatches preparing for the snow and cold ahead: taking water craft out of the water for winter storage and cleaning out the flower beds, preparing for the holidays and other sundry things. This year is no exception and is shaping up to be even busier than normal after what was a busy summer. 

For one thing, we took our cat, Molly, downstate to a cat clinic for radiation treatment for hyperthyroidism. She has been on medication for two years, but it was no longer working. It has been traumatic for both us and poor Molly since she had to stay at the clinic for four days and is now in quarantine at home for a week. The treatment itself is very safe, but she was stressed to the max just being taken away from home and "abandoned" by her people and now isolated from all of us in her room alone. She came home very thin and totally exhausted but is now doing fine if not very lonely. 

In spite of the hubbub, I started a new drawing the other day. Not a sketch but an honest to goodness drawing of a Quarter Horse mare that I wanted to finish in colored pencil. I will probably also use the drawing for an oil or pastel painting of this mare and her foal, a painting that I've long wanted to do. 

The drawing was done freehand using the photograph above. I didn't do any measurements to start with, and when it was done, I found some problems. Hunting up my calipers or dividers or whatever you call the thing, I used that to measure the proportions of that particular horse, using the head as the basic measurement by which all others were compared. One head equals the length of the neck and also the width of the barrel and the length of the forelegs to the fetlocks and so on. I traced the original drawing onto a sheet of tracing paper, making some adjustments as I went. This is just the first tracing. I will do another over the top of this one because there are still several adjustments to be made. 

When I'm satisfied with the drawing, I'll trace it onto a good sheet of paper and finish it with colored pencil. That can serve as my color study for the larger oil painting. For that I will add a foal and a background. The foal photo I'd like to use has lighting opposite to what is in the photo of Echo, and I'll have to change it to match the mare by doing some sketches and a value study before proceeding to the painting. 

It feels very good to be tackling a brand new image with challenges to overcome and having the confidence to do it. 

Echo was a former ranch horse who became a broodmare and a trail horse. She is still very much missed by her family. This will be her tribute. 

"Feel So Fine" Frisky Colt In A Spring Pasture. Spring Sale Offering

"Feel So Fine" Pastel Painting of a Foal in Spring

Today is the first official full day of Spring, and isn't it especially welcome this year? Never mind that it snowed here this morning.

For we horse lovers, signs of Spring bring thoughts of newborn foals in all their cuteness. This is a painting of a foal that I created several years ago which has still not found a home. I don't quite know why, but it happens. For some works of art, it just takes a little longer for the right person to come along and fall in love with them and take them home. 

The subject of this painting is Bullet, a Morgan colt that a friend allowed me to photograph many years ago. He's a little flashy for a Morgan with all that white and he was so lively running around, bucking and kicking out, as he raced around the paddock. I put him in a Spring pasture to make a more Springlike composition to set the mood better. 

Titled "Feel So Fine", this pastel painting is available for the special Spring Sale price of $205 framed plus shipping. It measures 12.5x14 inches and is double matted inside a brushed gold frame. If you're interested in purchasing this painting of Bullet, please message me to arrange for the sale. 

This isn't the only time I've painted Bullet, though. On a second photo shoot at the farm I got more pictures of him and more foals. Now Bullet is all grown up, still handsome and still prancing around when turned loose for the day. The painting below is also a pastel on pastelmat and was sold several years ago. 

"Bullet In Motion" Pastel Painting of a Morgan Gelding

Please visit my website, Karen Thumm Fine Art to see more of my work and see works in progress. I plan to be very busy in the studio this Spring and Summer creating more art for you to enjoy. 

The Saga of a Painting - "Have We Met? - Belgian Horses"

reference photograph of two draft horses for an equine painting

Felled by another bout of Hummingbird syndrome, I haven’t done any painting in a couple of weeks now. But I did sort through all of my photographs of one painting, both in progress and completed and managed to correct the best finished photo to very closely match the painting. 

I thought it might be instructive to artists and non artists alike to show you the reference photograph that I worked from and discuss all the changes I made in the painting. So, here goes. 

Above is the reference photo that I took at a horse pull at the county fair several years ago, and below is the finished painting.

"Have We Met? - Belgian Horses" 12x16 oil painting on canvas

Here’s a list of the changes made: 

1. Since I wanted the painting to be of a pair of Begians, I changed the color of the left hand horse from bay to chestnut. 

2. The horses were finished competing and were sweaty and unharnessed. I wanted the painting to show them freshly groomed but not show horse shiny since they’re work horses after all. Getting the muscling and highlights to look natural proved to be a big challenge. I had to look for other references of Belgians with the light coming from the proper direction. 

3. That trailer. Rusty and beaten up was not what I had in mind, so away it went to the body shop for some work and a new paint job. Again, I had to find other references for how a shiny trailer would reflect light. Luckily, I had some from a draft horse show. I also set up two of my Breyer model horses  right next to a shiny flat plane to see where the reflections would be. Notice that there are none in the reference photos. 

4. In the photograph the horses’ ears make a funny tangent where they almost touch. To correct that, I changed the right hand horse’s ear position slightly until it looked better. 

5. I confess to not liking very wide blazes that go over the nostrils on horses. So, I changed the right hand horse’s blaze to a narrower one. I didn’t change the actual shape of his muzzle at all, and notice how much more narrow it looks with the narrower blaze. 

6. Most Belgians do have blazes, so I added one to the left hand horse - just because I wanted to. 

7. Notice the fender showing in the reference photograph? I took it out of the painting because it was confusing and added nothing to the image. 

8. The trailer interior and uprights.What I was seeing in the reference photograph didn’t make sense, so I changed it to correspond with the near side, taking into account that the trailer was at a slight angle in the plane of the painting. 

9. I cropped the photograph to offset the horses’ heads slightly to avoid a perfectly centered composition. Notice that you see far less of the right hand horse’s shoulder.

10. The final change I made to the image was to give it a new name from the working name of “The Green Team” to “Have We Met? -Belgian Horses” which I think better expresses the engagement of the horses’ gazes with the viewer. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little trip through the brain of an artist and that you’ve learned a thing or two about how to use reference photographs in the best possible way. Rarely is a photograph perfect in every way, and some photographs just don’t work as paintings. Learning to evaluate a photograph from a compositional point of view is a necessary part of progressing as a realist artist. 

Painting; Making Color Charts

Red Color Chart of Oil Painting Pigments by Brand

A couple of weeks ago I made the very painful decision to give up on trying to finish a painting, let alone two paintings, to enter in a juried show at a museum in Texas. One painting wasn’t advancing to my satisfaction, and the other one was barely started. Better, I decided, to put the paintings aside and do them properly later than rush it and end up with subpar paintings. 

Meanwhile, I was sidetracked with other projects. One of them was to create color charts of all of my pigments. I’m doing them by colors, and shown above are the reds which are currently in my inventory. 

Step One; Create a Grid

I chose to do these on  9x12 canvas panels because I had them on hand, but one could also do them on unstretched canvas or canvas paper. The first step was to draw a grid on the boards with a fine tip Sharpie. At the very top is the brand of paint abbreviated and the color name. 

I tried to sort all the tubes in some kind of order from lightest to darkest and/or warmest to coolest. Some of my guesses weren’t quite right but it doesn’t matter that much. I put a dab of each color on a 9x12 paper palette. You really don’t need more than a dab. In the left lower corner I put a bigger dab of Titanium white, the most used white by artists. In the lower right corner I put a dab of ivory black. 

Step Two; Paint The Chart

In the second square from the top I placed an “X” with the Sharpie which revealed how transparent or opaque each color is. In that square was placed the mass color right from the tube. Below that I added successive amounts of white to the color until it reached a very pale value in four stages. 

Notice which mass color swatches still reveal the “X” and which don’t. 

Step Three; Paint The Darker Values

The chart is divided in half top to bottom by another grid line. This separates the half adding white from the half that black was added to. For the first two charts, i didn’t put in the center grid line and the demarcation tended to wander up and down across the board. The red chart looks much neater so I’ll definitely do that for the rest. 

Starting from the top of the lower section, I added increasing amounts of black to each tube color, starting with a very small amount until the final box contained just black with a small portion of the color. There are five divisions in the lower section. For those pigments which were already dark in value, five steps were not needed because they went to very very dark in a hurry, as you can see with the one Indian Red and the Gamblin Alizarin Permanent. 

My palette setup for painting the charts

Conclusions

The charts are very revealing. They tell me which colors/pigments are transparent and which are opaque or some degree in between. They tell me just how much a pigment will be dulled down by a touch of black added. They reveal the warm/cool bias of the color. For instance, the Old Holland Red Gold Lake on the far right goes very orange very quickly when white is added. So does the Old Holland Tansparent Oxide Red Lake. 

Notice the warm pinks produced by the Old Holland Scheveningen Red Light contrasted to the cool pinks produced by the Alizarins and the Old Holland Magenta (what a pretty hue that is!). One Alizarin is slightly more blue than the other while Old Holland Vermillion Extra is very close to the Old Holland Cadmium Red Light. 

Using this information I can tell which colors are similar enough to stock one in my studio supplies while setting the other aside in my plein air paint box. Or, which color will not be needed to replace when it runs out. 

I also got a feel for how well each tube of color handled. Some of my older paints are very stiff and applied very grainy, so they may need to be replaced with newer paint or eliminated altogether. 

Final Notes

I used only two #6 brushes (my favorite mongoose: one natural bristle and the other synthetic blend). One brush was used for the lighter half of the chart and the other was used for the darks only. This worked well although I had to rinse and clean the brushes carefully between colors so that remnants in the brush wouldn’t influence the next color. 

When the charts are done, I scrape off the remnants of the pigments and wipe down the palette for the next chart, leaving any remnants of white and black in the corners. Then the palette goes into the palette keeper until the next day. 

I also used gloves for part of the process, my favorite is the Nitrile EX  which seem to be fairly tough but also very comfortable and thin. My husband brings them home from the office for me. 

I look forward to finishing the charts and using them to help me get better acquainted with all my pigments when I soon get back to painting. 

Meanwhile, I’m also doing some sketching. Here’s one I did years ago from life of our German Shepherd, Daisy. That’s as far as I got before she moved. 

Pencil sketch from life of our German Shepherd dog, Daisy

"#64" New Event Horse Oil Painting

Work in progress of  an event horse. Oil on canvas

Since I'm still not very mobile with this broken leg and can't go work out in the flower beds, I have to content myself with creating greenery in my paintings. 

Yesterday's painting project created great strides forward with the other new big painting. I laid down the first layer of color on the background and am so far very pleased with it. It will compliment the bright chestnut color of the horse very well. 

The working title is "#64". It is a 20x24 inch oil painting on stretched canvas of an event horse at a horse trials on his way to a dressage test. The horse's name was Fuel Efficient, the event was the Encore Horse Trials near Chelsea Michigan about 2000-2002. I got a lot of good pictures that day and met and made friends with the show photographer, Rebecca Baucus. I'll be forever grateful for her friendliness and shooting tips. 

Sadly, show photographers are having a very hard time of it these days. They spend a lot of money on equipment and training, spend long hours shooting all the horses at shows and then long hours going through the photographs, creating proofs for clients and handling the sales of prints to owners and riders. Believe me, they earn every penny they make! But, today with digital cameras taking over from film cameras, anyone can shoot at shows, and many unscrupulous "photographers" poach customers from the official show photographers and take income away from them. Many professional horse photographers have given up shooting at shows as a result. 

The side effect of this is that some show photographers are hostile toward artists who are at shows to shoot reference photos. We have to walk a fine line to avoid interfering with the professionals as a result. I carry business cards with me but do not pass them out unless asked. I turn down any request to shoot someone's horse and sell the prints, and I stay out of the way of show photographers. I have also introduced myself a few times so that they know who I am and why I'm shooting willy nilly all around the show grounds. 

The other thing we artists have to be careful about is not violating the privacy rights of the owners, trainers and riders by painting their exact likenesses. Technically, we should get model releases from them all, but this is extremely impractical. The simple solution is to change markings on horses and facial features on humans, particularly kids. 

I used to enjoy going to the shows, seeing all the fine horses and riders all spiffied up and watching the action. Shooting dogs is a side benefit. Every show has lots of dogs in attendance, either with the barns who come to show or with spectators. I'm hopeful that once the leg heals I'll be able to get around better again and can again take my cameras to shows to "shoot" horses. 

Twilight Reverie; Painting The Horse

"Twilight Reverie", horse oil painting on canvas

It’s Memorial Day weekend, and the weather is beautiful, the trees are finally leafing out and Spring bulbs are blooming here in NW MIchigan. I’m ignoring reports that there is still ice on Lake Superior. 

My kids are here visiting, but since I can’t do much yet, I’ve spent two days in the studio working on two different paintings. The first one just consisted of getting the image drawn on the canvas and then reinforcing the lines by painting over them with a tiny brush. Nothing exciting to see there. 

The second painting is the one above. The first layer of paint was applied to the horse and the bit of sky that shows. I had problems that slowed the process. For one thing, the paint was thick. For another I had problems with paint brushes. I felt like Goldilocks and The Three Bears; some brushes were too stiff and some too soft. The paint either was going on unevenly or I had little control over what the brush did with the paint. I finally found some that worked and managed to finish the horse in one day. 

When the work session ended and I looked at the painting, I wasn’t very pleased with the results. Then I took out my trusty red acetate report cover and looked at the painting through it. The red makes the color dissolve pretty much into only values of light and dark. Immediately it was obvious that I had gotten the light areas within the horse too light which was causing the horse to have a kind of disjointed look. 

Then I felt better. With the next application of paint, I can correct that. All of the preparation work of doing the planning and the color study are now paying off. The painting has a long way to go yet, but it is well under way now, and I have high hopes for it.