In 2003, I began doing the Old Farmer’s Almanac Garden Calendars for Yankee Publishing. Today …like, right now— I’m working on 2024’s calendar.
A lot has changed for the calendar and the company in nearly 20 years. There’s a new art director now. The art has gotten bigger and has more complexity in the backgrounds. The cover art sprawls beyond its now-minimally-decorative border. At one time I used to use an actual airbrush to get a gradient color in the backgrounds. After I’d painted them and the paint was dry, I’d ship the art via FedEx a few days earlier than the deadline so they’d have them on time.
Today, I use Photoshop and a digital tablet and when the images are completed, I drop the files into Dropbox. I still love this project. Every year I get to reimagine and reinvent my work for it, experimenting to see how I can improve my desing and color abilities. When I switched to digital, the challenge has been (and remains) to obtain a look of digital “paint” that looks like my actual paint. I’m still chasing this.
Digital media has made my life quite easy, but every so often, I go into my archived work (flat files in a large lidded wooden crate) and look at the 200 or so physical paintings that I did at the start. And every once in a while I identify one that I think could use a Gnome, so I add one. It amuses me.
“Strawberry Pot”, 2012 and 2016. Work of the artist.
