wallwalker

I've watched a fair number of art conversation videos, just because it's satisfying to me how to the paintings look after they're cleaned and retouched. The guy I usually watch tells a lot of Dad jokes, talks a lot about the process, and is very vocal about how much he dislikes when people try to cover up small mistakes with tons of paint.

Example: This one,  which is just titled Art Restoration Fail, because the previous attempts at "fixing" the picture had turned into overpainting the entire thing. (This post title is related to the painting, trust me.) Painting over someone else's work and presenting it as an original is really weird to see in traditional media.

(To be clear, if I had seen the original painting on its own and not as an overpaint of someone else's work, it would've looked fine. It's the "paint over this to 'fix' it and pass it off as the original work" part that isn't great.) 

Still, whenever he talks about how natural resins are fallible and synthetic ones aren't, I can't help but think that eventually we're going to find some drawback to them, in a few hundred years, and if there are still art conservators then they'll be just as annoyed with some of those materials that he's used, as he gets about some of the older ones.

My husband actually suggested I might try oil painting, if I want a creative outlet, but I don't see how it could work. About the only place that we COULD do it is on the balcony, because we live in a small apartment and I am fairly sure that you have to have a lot of ventilation for those.

The more I read about Deviantart's license, the less I want to upload more stuff there. I may de-activate my account, or just use it to follow others. Which means posting more art here.

This is a tree that I drew for Artslam this year - I didn't finish the summer, but I did get some good pieces produced. More than I had over the past few years, at any rate. This is pencil and soft pastels.

(The full size is much too big to post here.)

Asked my art teacher the other day what I should ask if I were to start doing pet portraits in charcoal for people. (I can do them pretty quickly, especially if I use the same process as the lion I drew in our last class, which I'll post online at some point when I can get a good photo.) She said that I should start at $40.

I'm all for artists getting paid what they deserve, but that seems high. Of course, that's for a charcoal picture (specialized equipment) and a hard copy, so she was probably assuming local people. Graphite would be cheaper, and digital copies cheaper still, I imagine. Maybe twenty for a graphite sketch on a digital copy, twenty-five for a scanned charcoal sketch or a hard copy of a graphite sketch.

I don't know. What's your opinion, do you think people would pay for that? My traditional art folder is here, and the more recent stuff IS a lot better than the older sketches. I'd just have to find the right audience somehow, people who would actually like my drawings and be okay with paying for pictures of their pets.