Making colours work

My desire to make pictures, even the digital ones, began firmly with a love of paint. My heart absolutely sang when I found this great blog post at one of my favourite Facebook 'Likes', Retronaut (highly recommended, one of the best little blue and white buttons I ever pushed). Feast your eyes on photographs of actual palettes of Seurat, Van Gogh, Renoir and Delacroix with images like these:

Seurat's palette reveals clues to his technique as well as
use of colour

I have something in common with Gustave Moreau
at least, my palettes are as messy as this.

Colourlovers, another fascinating site for those who are intrigued by how great painters actually went about things uses colour analysis tools to explore the palettes of specific paintings. I really like the idea of being able to draw out a basic colourscheme from a painting that affects me visually. I think one of the greatest ways to learn anything is to look at things you admire and try and work out how they began. I went looking therefore for some tools to analyze palettes. I found several but  far and away the best one was this: http://www.cssdrive.com/imagepalette/index.php.
I chose my image Northern Lights because it has quite a broad spectrum of colours and fed it into the app and this was the result:

That site actually allows you to save the colour scheme as a CSS style sheet which means you can base the theme of a website or page on the colourscheme of an artwork or photograph you like. This app gives much much more colour information than the others I tried too. Give it a whirl, it's loads of fun and the possibilities for artists and designers who want to get under the skin of what makes a particular image pop are endless.

On Paint and Palettes....

    I'm not, it is probably obvious, a trained painter. I'm pretty much self-taught and although I always enjoyed and was praised for my art when a kid the obsession to really get at it only fully struck me quite late in the day, at the most inconvenient time for such a messy obsession to install itself. Paint was in short my pregnant craving. No, I didn't have any really strong desire to eat it but all of a sudden, back in 1983, when I was living (believe it or not)  in a little Greek pigeon house under a mulberry tree on Mykonos (Vienoula's Garden for those who know ;-)) and just going into my second trimester for my adored son - suddenly PAINT. Oh I had to have it. Along with paint there was also Welsh Mints (not easy to obtain in the Greek Islands even now) and Opera, a form of music I had hitherto had absolutely zero interest in seeing as dancing to New York House DJ's in Pierro's was more my style at the time. I remember I got hold of some paint, tape of Carmen, some Caran D'Ache crayons and on one of those ersatz canvas pads made some sloppy efforts at abstracts. I hadn't a clue what I was about.

     I had known artists growing up as a tiny child in the late 50s. If you remember the Stella Artois advert where the bar owner is grumbling about taking all these payments of paintings in return for his fabulous beer (little realising that he is collecting a future king's ransom in masterpieces) it was a bit like that with my folks who had a club on the King's Road Chelsea in London. We didn't acquire any Van Gogh's or Gauguin's unfortunately but I did get to visit various studios of artists of the day and The Gateways was quite renowned for the paintings that adorned the walls (not many photos of them remain, I do have a few and will get them out and publish them here when it gets cooler).

     So the smell of oils was an early memory (though I find linseed almost intolerable as it happens and when I was pregnant it was out of the question). The Chelsea artists of the days loved earthy colours. As one whose childhood and teens were in the 60s I developed a strong attraction to the clear and vivid colours of The Beatles' Yellow Submarine. I also unusually enough grew up with American comics provided by someone close who was at the time a servicewoman stationed the AAF base in Ruislip and could therefore shop at the PX there. So Superman, Casper the Ghost, Green Lantern and Flash were my heros. In those days of course they were simply printed on comicbook paper but the colours were rich and the covers of each edition were a weekly treat. I loved them.

   So it has taken me a good many years to light upon a memory of the particularly resonant sludgy blue-green-grey-gold-brown that underpinned those art pieces I remember from my earliest years. Over the past few years I have only painted in my mind. Some would say that's not enough and I would agree with them. However it has had to do. You'd be amazed how much time I have spent dreaming up versions of that strangely vivid sludge. I have some big plans in that direction. More soon...

Here's one I sold earlier...happy customer, happy artist.

Handpainted print of Lemons & Garlic

    To tell the truth, like a lot of artists the very idea of selling my work makes me want to go to bed for a month. It's downright scary. 'I have spread my dreams under your feet...' just about sums it up. It's also massively time-consuming getting it altogether so one can give people enough assurance that they feel able to order a piece from someone they have never met.

I didn't realise how much it all meant to me, the months I have spent putting my online shop together until I got an email from a happy customer in Texas on the other side of the world the other day and I burst into tears!! I did something a little bit extra for her, I hand-painted one of her prints - something struck me as I was putting the pieces together. She wrote this to me:







"Thank you so much!!!  I cannot believe you did that!  The painting is beautiful and I feel so honored.  I cannot wait to get them framed and hung in my house.  You are a very sweet person for doing that....I cannot imagine anyone else doing the same.  Thank you again!   I am so excited!"


Isn't that lovely? I'm so happy to be really selling through all this. We are all a bit terrified here in Greece with one thing and another, it's a bit alarming to be trying to kickstart a new business in this economic climate. But on the other hand I just feel that somehow this venture has a glow about it, maybe I just want it that much.

So finally after much deliberation I am now offering hand-painted prints on the websites, not of all the images, some are not suitable for the technique. It's sort of a halfway house between a giclee artist print and a fully original painting and a very affordable way of hanging a real painting on your wall. The print is made on very good quality premium silk canvas (it's lovely). But there is no doubt that the canvas tends to absorb some of the colour. Some of the images, especially my more classic paintings like Kyperoussa, Island and Agios Antonios, come out fine but I do think that people looking at my site and purchasing one are probably a bit taken with the vivid colour. I can get it on the top of the range Ilford Galerie gloss paper but the canvas is a bit subdued. However - wow! What a solution painting over turns out to be. I had been a sceptic having seen some pretty awful travesties - cheap canvas, plonked on cheap paint...no no NO! But over a weekend painting into my Lemons & Garlic I became converted and the end product was fantastic. It was a nice job to do too.

Above is a picture of the finished handpainted print before it was packed away for sending - I photographed it hanging on a kitchen cupboard and it has come out slightly wonky but it was actually rectangular!!

If you would like one too you can order from here. I'll soon be offering handpainted ACEOs of this piece as well.

My ACEOs, Collectable Art Cards...a new venture

When I first started to paint one of the driving forces was the desire to create something special and unique you can hold in your hands. Not just an image but a satisfying object to treasure. Recently I stumbled upon a little craze for collecting Artist Trading Cards - they are known as ACEOs or ATCs to the cognoscenti. They are only 2.5 x 3.5 inches and are collected and traded by all sorts of people.
Now over the past few years I have had a bit of a tendency to think in terms of really large pictures but all of a sudden, with a bit of influence admittedly from gaining full understanding of shipping costs - small is beautiful! I really really want to make some of these cards! So I have been preparing with all the fervour of new obsession and have just taken the first batch to the printers to collect tomorrow.

I have made some from details from paintings like Island and Northern Lights. I'll be offering straight off glossy prints, handpainted prints on canvas (this is where I make a print from my work and handpaint over it to create an 'almost reproduction' each with individual unique features), and as soon as I have all this organised I will make some original one-off ACEO-sized paintings.

I managed to source all the materials I need here in Greece (well the polypropylene pockets have come from Cyprus) which pleased me a lot. I am blessed with an amazing printer who is so helpful and encouraging even of my smallest project and a lady called Margarita in Syros's new frame shop who cut all the black mat passe partout cards for me - I am sooo pleased with them!

Here are a few examples of the new cards. Do please message me if you would like to order - prices will be very low with discounts for buying several at a time - I'll be venturing onto Ebay and Etsy for the first time with some trepidation once I have figured out postage costs and the like.

Detail from Island

Detail from Island 

I'll be featuring most of my images in this new format and will soon add a selection of other small prints - 4x4, 5x7, 8x ll in and so on. I've made some lovely little certificates which I can sign and each one will have be an exclusive item. More news soon.

Detail from Northern Lights

Long day's journey....

How much there is to do to create an online presence for one's art and hopefully sell some. I am not a full time artist - I want to be of course but life doesn't permit it so I work at other things for a living. That isn't even a sob story, it's just that the artist in me is almost a separate function from the worker, I like my job and am lucky to be able to do it from wherever I am.
So, we thought, I'll set up a website, sell some prints. Maybe I can win back a day a week to have for myself and start creating some more work, get at the paints.  Keep going, keep going!
Exploring the web I find myself in awe time and time again of the work to be found. Then you look and the date of the last post on the blog is months, even years ago. I want to make a flow. I guess it is the early posts that are the worst to deal with, one coughs and feels self-conscious. Everything seems pretentious.
So here's the plan. I won't have one. I'll keep sticking something on here, sharing the picture that's on my mind today or whatever and let the thing invent itself. I can see how it will be because I know what I do and what I want to share and I also know my objective, it's just starting it that is weird.
Here on this island it is the most perfect time of year, beautiful, warm and sunny but not too hot. This little painting I did of a garden in a back street is the one most on my mind right now, were I to be able to paint today this is the sort of thing I would be doing:

Lalakia Garden: Painting of a Garden in the backstreets of Ermoupoli, Syros by Luigina Ware. Visit website to buy print

At last...I'm launching my websites!

Well it has taken me just a bit of a while but finally, at last, after much wailing and gnashing of html, hollow-eyed nights wrangling with prices and sizes, angst over logos and layout and a really horrible state of consternation and misery over the copy I have finally launched two websites where prints of my work can be bought. If I had had any idea how long it would take I'd probably have printed a few off and made for a beach somewhere but truth to tell I am really proud of them now. Please come and visit:

The first one shows all my Greek art work:

www.aegeanlight.co.uk

 the second is for everything else - right now the digital work and some reproductions of paintings:
www.anotherlight.co.uk

A big part of the work involved was getting the test prints made. I had fantastic help from my printers in Syros, PrintIt Today who couldn't do enough to help. The samples look really wonderful - better than I hoped. The colours are vivid, the paper and canvas choices are lush and the images are sharp - all in these are products I am very happy with and will be proud to show.

So now there is just the small matter of getting my social network fired up and operational.

For this blog in particular, I have made no rules. I am just hoping that good labelling and tagging will make sense of it all.....