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.
Ever wonder why some images hold your attention while others fall flat? In this post, I share the compositional secrets that make an image unboring—and why our subconscious responds so powerfully to them.
Winter is the third panel in the Seasons series for my friends, a lovely couple who now live in Arkansas. We met several years ago at an art conference and they were there as avid fans of imaginative realist art. They found my work and subsequently invited us to visit them. Sometime after that, they commissioned this series.
Summer is the second panel in the Seasons series for my friends, a lovely couple who now live in Arkansas. We met several years ago at an art conference and they were there as avid fans of imaginative realist art. They found my work and subsequently invited us to visit them. Sometime after that, they commissioned this series.
I’ve done only one graphic novel. It was 104 pages long. In the 2 years (nearly) it took me to complete it, I learned that while I had a great deal of fun (and really became proficient at Photoshop), I wouldn’t (probably?) do another one. At least that’s what I say now. Never say never?
There are TONS of resources out there for self-initiating artists, and there are many venues to advertise and sell work. Here is a list of many of the resources I’ve used over the years— there are many more newer ones out there to discover.
A post about a commission of a series of 4 paintings tied together thematically by the “seasons”, done in my usual botanical style and content. So that means the images will be overflowing with plants and animals, particularly bugs, flowers, etc. Everything jockeying for a place onstage, tumbling and vying to be seen, interacting with the environment, living in their niches…
What is letterlocking? It's the old practice of sewing and sealing your letter with wax to create an “envelope” to ensure that the letter hasn’t been read and that it hasn’t been tampered with. In 2022, unopened letters from Mary Queen of Scots surfaced and were unsealed by historians. The banished rival of Queen Elizabeth I used a “dagger”…
In 2023, my keyword is commitment. It’s not a very flashy word inspiring a lot of boldness or risk, but one that speaks of quiet grit. It’s a word that really describes what I feel is an appropriate focal point for my current thought.
You see, I know what burn-out is….
Like most kids in the 70s and 80s, I grew up with the traditional and practically obligatory art influences — Norman Rockwell, John James Audubon, Leonardo daVinci— seen as an old calendar page framed and hung on the wall or as a fancy coffee table book (right under the full-color glossy tome of King Tut’s treasures) but it wasn’t until…
You know that fun little new avatar creator, the Lensa app, that’s exploding in popularity right now? It’s made your new favorite avatars on your social media, it’s cheap, and best of all, you can tell it to make up to 50 avatars in a variety of art styles. Is it just harmless fun?
I’m excited to share with you that I’ve recently partnered with Ms. Jane Frank of Wow-Art agency , online gallery representative, to offer the original paintings for three of my books:
I received my first 2 Golden Guide book projects at the same time: Junior Golden Guide: Butterflies, and Moths, and Junior Golden Guide: Bees, Wasps, and Ants. Turnaround time for each was 6 months and I was so excited…
Say “SEO” and my stomach churns a bit and I feel a low grade anxiety, but I can’t place its source. It’s just a phrase that describes the rules that govern how other people search stuff online. According to web wizards like Neil Patel, how your product/ offering/ service is searched by the majority of us humans is the guide by which you should choose your keywords— and not how you would maybe categorize it or describe it yourself.
Students, artists in particular, get frustrated with the seeming lack of speed on their journey to “success” (whatever that might mean). And I get it. I quit art school (the first time in the 80s) with one semester to go because I was offered a job “ghost” painting with a professional illustrator. I mean, the choice of go to school or make money and art….
What is your wonderful art nerd superpower and gives you great joy in the doing? Do you have a lot of "shoulds" chattering away in your brain, telling you that you need to make one kind of art over another? Is it motivated by the glittery prospect of surface rewards that have nothing to do with the deeper satisfaction of actually creating the work?
Hmmm. What am I afraid to tell you about myself that might make some of you self-select out and say "nope, that's not for me" right from the jump? I thought about it and after a bit of mild cheek-gnawing, thought-- ok, I’ll tell you: I believe in magic ….yes, I do.
Style is where our ability bumps up against our ambition, so technically, we *always* have a style. That means too, that as our abilities grow and ambitions change, our style is always evolving…
Whether you're looking at art in a gallery/ museum space or your own artwork, you want to be able to discern what the art is *doing* not just by the way a piece feels to you, but by some very objective and concrete observations that can be applied universally. Here are the components of objective critique of a work of art that I always used when I was teaching and assessing student work.
Trying to be something I really wasn’t meant that I hadn’t been paying enough attention to what my work was always saying to me. I lost my way because I got caught up in other artists’ journeys and what was successful for them, lured away by this idea that if I…
The great and venerable Western Publishing CO. sadly, was bought out by St Martin’s Press in the 90s but not before I got the chance to work with them on 5 books and a few pop up covers.
In 2003, I began doing the Old Farmer’s Almanac Garden Calendars for Yankee Publishing and today …20 years later, I’m still at it, working on 2024’s calendar.
Anyone interested in becoming a freelance illustrator first needs to develop a cohesive portfolio. If you’ve been making images for a while and are acquiring many that are showing a particular personal style and content, then choosing…
A friend of mine and I have been arguing about realism in art. It started with a conversation about photo reference. It prompted a larger question in my mind: what makes realism meaningful in the first place? And how much of it does a viewer actually need?