Anatomy and Art

What a delightful find tonight…

This and other such pieces can be found on the Vanitas, blog site of Fernando Vicente.
http://fernandovicentevanitas.blogspot.com/

Looks like he also has his own website.
http://www.fernandovicente.es/

My Spanish is pretty shaky, but he appears to be a well published painter, specializing in pin ups and political satire as well as the medical paintings I first saw on his blog.  He was born in Madrid, and he began his career in the 80s combining painting with illustration.

These are fantastic!

Recently I went through the process of getting prints made of a painting.  Real ones.  Good ones.  Expensive ones.  I have to say that the process has been a little bit terrifying.  For starters, let’s face it… I’m not exactly the greatest business mind out there.  But I gave this some thought as to what was reasonable to charge, how many I would make, how many I thought I could sell, and did a little research into what it would cost me.  Unfortunately, the first estimate of what it would cost me reflected less than half of the ultimate total costs I wound up spending.

At first it was a matter of having having gotten my estimates based on the image size without doing the math on what the added border for framing would be.  I’d expected there to be added cost for that, but I had underestimated how much.  Secondly I had to rescan the image.  Letting the printers scan your painting is not an inexpensive endeavor.  But in this case, I believe it was both necessary and worth it.  Between those first two points though, I wound up deciding to make fewer prints than I had originally intended.  It’s good that I didn’t make as many though, because the next blow came when I went to pick up the prints and found that their scan had picked up so much detail, that it had practically x-rayed my painting.  I didn’t catch it immediately.  At first glance, all I saw was that they had gotten the red right (no small detail, that), and that the new scan had not shown the same problem as the scan I had done previously.  I left happy.  But then as I was packaging up my first print for shipping, I saw that there were mistakes, familiar mistakes.  I kept wanting to dab a bit of paint here or there to fix them, and then I realized that I was having the exact same thought process I’d had while finishing the painting in the first place.  I was seeing mistakes brought back that I had already fixed, and I couldn’t send that to paying customers.  So I called the printers back.  I went through Gamma to do all of this.  Their tech who had done the scan for me had already left for the day, so I had to make plans to go back later that week after my finals (and yeah, taking on this process at the end of my semester, maybe not the greatest plan of action.)

I had purchased a digital copy of the scan as well, so I was able to review that as well.  I was surprised when I didn’t see the same detail from the under layer there.  But just now, just today, when I opened the image in Photoshop I did.  It’s the strangest thing, the detail is in there, but I wasn’t seeing it in the raw file.  It’s actually kind of a relief to see it now.  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how I was getting added detail from the printing process.  Anyway, despite picking up those covered brush strokes, it really is a beautiful scan.  Here is smaller version of what they got…

So I was able to go back in and discuss things with them.  It’s been a good thing, having the painting handy for all of this, not just for rescanning purposes, but also as something to bring in while talking about the desired outcome of the prints.  I’m fortunate that the buyer wanted me to hold on to it for the time being, and that I’ve been able to do all of this despite the sale.

They saw the problem, and we decided to have the prints redone with different settings.  Unfortunately, this brought my costs up considerably.  Since I hadn’t paid for giclee printing (which comes with the opportunity to approve proofs) my options were limited in terms of how to handle this.  They did make an effort to work with me though, and while I lament loosing so much of my profit margin, I am very happy with the way the 2nd set of prints came out, and the product I can now deliver to my clients.

In the end, I only wound up making six of them.  I’d initially thought about leaving the window open to further printing down the line, or making 12 all at once and just selling them off over time.  Especially considering the added costs along the way, I am happy that I only opted to create the six of them.  At present three of them have been paid for and shipped off to buyers.  One is spoken for, to be paid for and picked up in January.  And I may have a fifth buyer in the works.  All in all, this has been quite the learning experience, and something that I hope to do again and again with other works, though hopefully with less nervousness and better planning along the way.  It’s tricky though.  You don’t know if something is right or not until you see it.  You can’t know.  But I do know a little more about what to look for, and what to ask for now.  So here’s hoping that next time I can be a little less neurotic artist about things, and a little more savvy seller of my art.

I’m going to have some prints made of that last painting of mine.  I spoke with a printer today and I like this place a lot better than the last place I spoke with.  It sounds like I can get good archival inks and papers with these guys, and they’re good enough to be able to look at my digital image, but also match it using the original canvas since I still have it in my possession for the time being.  That’s good, since the digital files tend to come through a little bit on the bright side. The place I’m using is called Gamma Imaging and they seem to be really on top of their game.

I’m planning to sell prints for $100 each, plus shipping and handling.  Each will be signed and numbered.  I’m going to make this a run of twelve.  Please contact me if you are interested in buying one.  Here is fine, or you can contact me directly.

Well, I’m doing it again!  It’s time to show some paintings!

This time I’ll be showing with We Burn Chicago!  Local Chicagoans, please do come and check out some fine work from your local burners.

I’ll personally be showing these paintings and more!

Come find us at the Morning Glory Gallery at 571 W. 18th, 1R, Chicago, IL 60616!

We’ll be there Saturday, October 16th and Sunday, October 17th.

One of my classmates, Jeremy Brotherton, was involved in painting a mural this week.  Can you spot the medical artist contribution?

Well, I just managed to finish up another painting before the fall semester begins.  This is the first one I’ve ever had offers on before she was even finished.  That’s a new experience for me for sure.  I think that part of the reason for that is that the style I used for her was very clean and streamlined so you actually could see her even in just a cell phone picture.  Anyway, this one was fun to work on.  As is often the case, I was worried at first that I was pulling too much from my primary reference, a photograph found online.  But over time she started to come in to her own and take on a different feel.  I think the biggest turning point with this one was the adopting the clean line style.  I really wanted to use red, but when you try to blend red with a near white, you find yourself with pink, and that wasn’t what I wanted at all.  So I started just playing with the lines, and I think it came out very well.  Anyway, here she is.

So far I’ve just been calling her Red Woman.  Anything else just feels silly.  And yeah, I like her 🙂

Well wow, today was cool.  It had been years since I’d last shown my paintings, but today I got to do just that.  And, I even got to do so from the comfort of my own living room!  Sure, it’s a little weird rearranging your home for an artwalk, but I have to say that overall today was just great.  I loved being able to move art into it’s show space on my own schedule.  I loved being able to keep white wine chilled in the fridge and bring it out throughout the heat of the day today.  I loved getting to know my neighbors.  It wasn’t a big day for sales, mostly people just bought postcards, but I did get some interest in possible future sales, one of which I think will happen in the next week or two.  So that’s really cool.

I used to be very wary of ever selling my work.  Now I love it.  There is nothing more motivating to create more work than the empty space left on your wall from where someone has bought something.  Sure, the capitalism angle can be hard to take, and putting price tags on your pieces can be agonizing, but in the end, after your prices have been decided, when someone says they’ll take something and you know they’re really going to like it, it’s just a really great thing.

And honestly, I just have to say I was very pleased at how much of the living room conversion to a gallery came so naturally.  I think I may have underestimated so many years of showing at the Brewery Artwalk back in LA in group settings.  I guess I didn’t realize just how much I’d learned from those experiences, especially never having been in charge myself.  But I have to say, I felt on top of this.  Part of that was just good synchronicitous timing.  And choosing to only show paintings certainly simplified things over all.  No printing rushes, no last minute framing, all I had to do was move the paintings I wanted to show into the living room, and clear out the things I didn’t want in there for the show.  In the end, there were fifteen of them up on the walls.  Then I moved a curtain to set the space of where I wanted people to be, set up a little table with cards, postcards, snacks and an email sign-up sheet and voila, instant gallery!  I even happened to have a perfectly sized art board piece left over from past projects to make a sign out of and some fancy lights to lead people toward my door as the sun went down.

It’s really been a lovely day.

And because I’m still in show mode, here is a link to the gallery where I have every painting I’ve finished in the last decade posted.  Tree #5 is brand new and was created pretty much just for the show.  As it turns out, desolate little dried up trees are far more popular in sunny Los Angeles than here where people suffer an actual winter, but I’m happy to have made it just the same.  Feel free to peruse.

http://snapshotgenius.com/paint/

Well I’ve been off and traveling a touch here lately, but I can show off a recent painting of mine here.  I did this one as a wedding gift for some friends back in California.

This trick of doing likenesses is still pretty new for me, and I’m enjoying it a lot.  I find that when working in this style, I have to pay closer attention to the 3D nature of a face, whereas when I’m doing a more direct replication of a photograph I’m looking more at shadow and light.  I feel like my practice in sculpting, and time studying anatomy has already started to affect my work on canvas.  It will be interesting to see where this trend goes.

I recently managed to knock another painting out.  This isn’t anything medical.  In fact it’s my first time doing a celebrity likeness.  The really fun thing about doing a celebrity likeness is when people start to be able to tell who it is you’re painting without you telling them.  But I won’t play that game here.  This is my painting of Tom Waits, and I just signed it this morning.

Recently I was contacted about an old painting of mine and well, it looks like I’m making a sale.  Goodbye little Black and White Tree by the Moon!  I will miss you, but I know that you are going to a good home.

Now to figure out how one does shipping and such.  I don’t believe I’ve had cause to ship a painting yet.  I’m glad this is a small one.  Come to think of it, this is the first piece I’ve sold since moving to Chicago.  How lucky I am that any one remembers these.  And I simply must get around to showing out here.