Mother's Day Sale

Mother's Day Sale 2016

30% off Entire Order!!!  

Enter: MOTHERSDAY16

Now through May 9th.

Check out My Shop for more Original Art!!!

Color Studies

Color studies for a tomato.

Creating color studies has been long, boring, and tedious... then again mixing paint can be exciting.

It can also be terrifying when you realized you just wasted a large amount of expensive watercolor paint to end up with a color you don't want.  So make sure to put a swatch in your color studies swatch book, and note which colors, proportions, brands, etc.,

I remembered that I had fresh on the vine tomatoes in my kitchen...

In the end color mixing and creating all of those swatches has become well worth the effort.  The last time I did any serious color studies, that involved mixing my own paints, etc., was a good twenty plus years ago.

If you've never mixed colors before I highly recommend doing so, there are plenty of color mixing books available in the art book market to help get you started.

Color

I've finally hit that point, the one where I can no longer remember which colors are in my watercolor palettes so tonight I made a color map in a notebook for future reference.

I made maps for the first three palettes tonight, and as I was doing so I started wishing I had one of those huge palettes, the kind that holds 36+ pans. I have gobs of tubes of paint that are never used because there's no room in my current palettes for them to live.

My latest acquisition, a Pima watercolor palette.  The colors are numbered so it's hard telling what the actual colors are, am hoping I will find out someday what they are, I like them they're bright clear colors.

On My Table

Sulfur shelf fungus harvested some fifteen years ago now, displayed on a very old silver plate platter which serves to catch any bit of detritus that seems to fall continuously from the fungus.

Otherwise known as Chicken of the Woods (Laetiporus sp.)

Run, don't walk, to buy this book it's beyond delicious!!!

Back in Decemember I decided that 2016 would be about focusing on studio practices, improving rusty skills, and in general creating more artwork.

Which lead to the purchase of several online classes, books, art supplies and more.  Now if I could only remember what I learned from my Illustrator and Photoshop classes, sigh.  Sometimes I swear my brain is a sieve. 

I ""highly"" recommend these four books, and two more books that will be arriving this week!

Watercolors

I shall be dragging out my tubes of watercolors today...

because while I seem to own ever single commercially produced watercolor crayon...

palette...

or pencil...

I even have metallics and iridescent watercolors... and yet I don't have the color I need which is a true beige i.e. bird egg colors.

60 Days of Birds

The 60 Day Bird Journal Challenge

Join me starting April 1st! 

The challenge takes place in my FaceBook Group, I will post a PDF filled with 60 days of Challenge Prompts.  

If you participated in past challenges I sent a daily newsletter.  There will be no newsletter for this years challenge.  I will be posting daily to the FaceBook Group instead. 

Seed Pods

Crows

And there were three.  L to R.  Edgar, Allan, and Poe, my fake crow studio props.

Mark Making with Nature Blow Out Sale!

Mark Making with Nature:

Surface Design with Natural Dyes eBook Bundle 

$5.95 Now through March 15th!!! 

Own all Four eBooks for Today! 

http://www.kbaxterpackwood.com/e-Books.htm

Flower Joy

They're still alive!

It's time to divide the succulents into individual planters.

And I may have to transplant the ferns in this terrarium, it's growing like mad!

Finding Oneself

Or maybe this post should be titled giving myself permission to do what I love!  I've started digging my collections out of my office and wet studio and bringing them into my design studio, you know the place were I create!

There's this meme that has been circulating on Facebook that says, essentially, the things you spend the most time doing, that's your passion and that's where we should focus our energies.  Well my passion is nature, gardening, hiking, collecting natural items like shells, bits of bark with lichens on them, rocks, bones, flowers, seed pods, and more.

And art supplies, I love to collect and use art supplies!

And plants!  This spring I will start amassing native prairie plants that love shade and will turn my front and side yards into prairie gardens!

It's been almost three months since I planted the terrariums, and they are thriving! 

Curiosities & Artifacts

Working on a new project, photos coming soon.

In Progress Blue Bin

Charcoal, ink, conte, gesso, on paper.

Happy New Year!!!

More Bins

WIP Bins. Charcoal and conte on watercolor paper.

The past two months here have been short of horrific when it comes to the digital world.  My website is still down, have no idea why it's experiencing a 503 error, and the internet here at the house has been sketchy at best.

But, today we gave up after trying to do another firmware update on the older modem and two hours later we finally decided it was time for a new modem.  Nirvana!  Internet Bliss!!!

Have a good one!

Studio Sale!!! 25% Off Everything!

25% OFF Everything!!!

Studio Sale

Take 25% OFF Everything NOW through January 1st!!!

Sale Code: WINTER2015

Mark Making with Nature Surface Design with Natural Dyes

Figures in Motion

Figure in motion, charcoal on gesso'd watercolor paper.

Figure No. 2 in motion.  Figure No. 1 slightly gesso'd out and then No. 2 added on top of the wet gesso.

Figure No. 3, done same as No. 2.  I may have enough space to add another figure.  Taken from Muybridge's photo series of back side shots of a nude male throwing a ball.

Hello Monday Thoughts on Licensing Fear and Adobe Illustrator

The past few years in art licensing have been interesting to say the least.  I think it was sometime late 2013 I had decided that I really wanted to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator for repeat pattern design and for everything else one would use it for creating licensable designs.

My long suffering and very loving husband gave me the money for what was at that time to me an expensive class.  Yay me, I'm going to master Illustrator.  Not!!!  By week three I was so damned terrified of the program it'd be almost a year and a half before I'd even open the program on my computer again.

You see it turns out that while the instructor knows gobs about creating repeat patterns, designs, icons from one's original artwork and the like she didn't know jack shit about Illustrator and to be honest should have never have been teaching a course on illustrator!

Roll in Bonnie Christine and Elizabeth Olwen via Skillshare.  While not promising me that I would master Illustrator, like the last instructor had, they did tell me that I would at least know how to turn the program on and with lots of practice I too could create a vector, and most importantly create images that could be translated into a repeat pattern.  And they delivered on what they had promised.

Curious I decided to sign up for Brad Woodard's Adobe Illustrator classes.  Brad where have you been the past three years!!! I learned more about Illustrator from him in one week than I had in three years elsewhere, most importantly which tools inside of Illustrator that would make my work flow efficient, no more doing things the hard way!

So curiosity got the better of me and I went back to the original class, started at the beginning thinking that well now that I understand the terminology and some of the tools now maybe, just maybe...

Oh hell I didn't even last five minutes before I was screaming at my computer monitor telling the instructor that she was doing it wrong, all wrong, she was using the wrong tools, making things way harder than they had to be... and then it dawned on me.  She sucked!  I had been living in fear of a computer program for well over a  year because this woman had NO business teaching a class on illustrator! This is some instructors super power by the way, they teach fear, they don't teach skill, confidence, etc, no they teach fear.  Walk away, NO RUN AWAY from these people they are toxic!

Sooooo, are you still there?  This fall I was invited to participate in an interview about art licensing and my studio habits/life.  I was excited, ecstatic, it's a REALLY good thing Annie told me she wanted my interview information on November 25th instead of the actual deadline of November 29th because I probably would have found a reason to say No!

Why you ask?  Even though I've been licensing my stencil designs with StencilGirl Products I have yet to get up the courage to send my portfolio out to agents for representation. Because I'm afraid.  What am I afraid of you might ask?  To be honest nothing in particular, other than being accepted... Yes I'm nuts, I think I may have stated this before.

But looking at the sheets I put together for Annie's interview I see now that being afraid of being rejected is just as lame as being afraid of being accepted.  I'd like to spend more time pondering this topic but I have some drawing to do and will then digitize those images in Illustrator for creating licensable art.  

Blackbirds in Trees Stencil from StencilGirl Products

So this is where I've been the past three years, hiding in my studio creating work like a mad woman and too afraid to submit it because "what if they want more and I can't deliver"???

Inky Figures

Am finally getting to the inky figures portion of the online drawing class I'm currently taking. The hardest part is waiting for the layers of ink to dry.

Waiting for the layer of white ink to dry so I can add more figures to this piece.