2018 french photos cd size desktop calendar

Somehow, in the first Christmas rush of my portrait career, I had managed to store this first draft in a place where pastel had dusted onto it, and then stored it in a portfolio that was shoved behind a bunch of things for years until I pulled it out and went through it. In working my way through my studio in 2019 I’ve found many other older works that I made but left packed away. KazmarskiĪbove, the original “Three Black and White Cats” watercolor at 12 x 16. Three Black and White Cats, watercolor, 12 x 16 (the original) © Bernadette E. Give it up, it is what it is, it will be what it’s meant to be. The works in which I strived to some sort of perfection were ones that ended up stiff and lifeless, overworked, things that even others could see. Your work will never be perfect because each of us sees things differently, and even we see things differently moment to moment. I still observe both points today, and they made me successful in both my commercial design career as well as my fine art career.Īnd in summary, “perfect” is a myth. If the work started to take a turn I didn’t expect I was more prepared to consider and explore the changes. I could also plan ahead for materials and make sure I had what I needed. The lesson for me was to take the time to really understand what I wanted to say with a work, to explore it thoroughly in my mind, whether it was a commission or not, and found that also helped me build my skills because I didn’t start wandering mid-composition and be forced to experiment as I was painting. In both cases you learn far more about your skills and what skills you need to develop by “working it out”, and you develop your own self-esteem and pride in your work by finishing everything you start. In the second it’s difficult to take a work seriously if you don’t commit to finishing it, and sometimes it means you don’t take yourself seriously. In the first case, you can decide you don’t like something in your work and start over a dozen times because there will always be something you don’t like. Don’t abandon a work and never return to it.When I recommitted myself to working as an artist in the mid-80s I had two rules that I felt would help me be successful: It’s a lesson in flexibility, learning to change your vision and reimagining a work. One of the things I remembered one of my art teachers telling us somewhere along in school was that there are no mistakes, you should always try to make your work “work”. It’s one of the rare portraits where I started painting and decided it wouldn’t work, abandoned that initial effort and started over, and so I have two portraits of these three black and white cats. I wanted people who wanted commissioned artwork to see my materials and inspirations and I loved to share the stories of the subjects as well as the portraits themselves.īut I didn’t tell the whole story of the genesis of this portrait, and the lesson I learned about composition and working with photos when I worked on this portrait, lessons I’ve used with every portrait since. That’s what I had to say back in 1992 when I painted this portrait and began to set up my artwork portfolios, literal photo albums of my paintings, portraits and other commissioned works with their stories and information, and sometimes even reference photos. The positioning is a little odd, but this was a gift, and this was the only photo available, and it ended up making a very interesting portrait.” My customer had commissioned it as a gift for her parents-she had given them the cats as kittens, and they lived to their teens.

“These three were littermates, and were rarely seen far from each other.

Commissioned Portraits: Starting Over, Early Lessons in Working With Photos Three Black and White Cats, pastel, 16 x 22 © Bernadette E. I “finished” it recently to use, and now I offer that original version of it for sale. But I kept that first portrait, and I’ve always liked it.

This month’s artwork began as a commissioned portrait, and that portrait has a story-one of the few that I started, but stopped because I didn’t like the way it was turning out, then created another portrait in a different media. Three Black and White Cats, watercolor, 12 x 12 © Bernadette E.

2018 french photos cd size desktop calendar