I'm not one to really struggle falling asleep, but for some reason I just couldn't shut my brain off. LeAnn was still reading, and I laid awake starring at the lamp on the bed stand beside me. I couldn't stop thinking about how this lamp would be a challenge to draw, and that I would need to stay true to values and edges in order to make it look real. That was the trigger for me. I couldn't take it any more, so I grabbed a pencil and a paper and began to draw. This is the 45 min. result. I hope you like it.

This is a checklist that I naturally follow, for the most part, while drawing.

1. Squint - This simplifies the shapes on your subject to more recognizable blocks of abstract shapes. If this doesn't make sense read this.

2. Back and Forth (Quickly) - I look from my drawing to my reference so much that I sometimes I get dizzy. If you look back and forth quickly, your drawing will look like its shifting if its wrong. Try it, you'll understand. I look at my reference far more than I look at my drawing. (SIDE NOTE: John Singer Sargent would look at his model for a long period of time, and then slowly place one stroke down and back up and repeat the process until the painting was done. You wouldn't think that looking at his paintings, but that is why he needed so few brush strokes to render a likeness. He looked at the model more than his painting.)

3. Easy Shapes - Look for shapes and lines which are straight up and down or straight across. These are the easiest angles to draw, and the rest of the angles are easier to recognize and draw once these vertical and horzontal lines are done.

Confused? Here is an examnple:

We have some really nice "one-of-a kind" frames for sale. Each of these frames were created uniquely for the piece of art. They were all distressed, leafed and painted by hand. They were made by a professional framer that you can check out at Goldrivergallery.com. Each of these images are textured to look like original paintings. The images look much better in real life because the camera kept picking up the glare from the texture. These were supposed to go to China, but no one feels like they want to take them over there anymore. We would like to sell these at the wholesale price of $299 or best offer. Shipping is $17. Please email us at epicart@mail.com if you are interested in owning any of these pieces.

Palettes are amazing. With just a few colors you can essentially mix any color that you see. Once you get past the secondary color mixing of green, purple, and orange, you enter into the dark world of the deceiving grays. Pretty much everything in our site right now, besides our computer screen, is simply a gray color with a hint of a pure color, like red or blue or yellow. I remember being frustrated about how I couldn't get colors right, and the majority of the time I was mixing the color too pure. I didn't dare to make it gray, because that would mean that its gray not red or blue.... boy was I wrong. If we want to learn color right now it would be wise to start with gray, which is close to the value of the color that you are trying to mix, and mix in the pure color in small increments. We'd probably arrive to the color faster than the other way around. Besides flowers, clothing, and the computer screens, we rarely see colors in their pure form. Grays are hard to nail down too. They shift with every stroke we paint. For example, if we put a grayish orange next to a grayish blue, the grayish orange and the grayish blue will look more intense. This is the principle of complimentary colors. They intensify each other. They make each other powerful, and that is what makes it difficult. We'd expect that they are purer than they really are. So mixing colors takes practice, time and thought to master, and I don't think that we can really nail it in a life time.... well maybe a few have, but for most of us, we simply give it a good effort and settle. The best way to learn how to paint color is to paint everything over and over again until it clicks. Pay attention to patterns, and principles. If principles govern our mixing, our colors will be more accurate and take less time to mix than before. PAY ATTENTION with every color shift while mixing. This is the only way to perfecting color. Its filled with headaches, frustration, and anger. But this hard road doesn't justify becoming apethetic. We never learn, without challenges. And the reward for those who push on... its a masterpiece, that may even influence millions. I'd say thats a fair trade off.

I know, I know, its not very manly to like flowers. But I have to admit that they are perhaps one of the funnest things to paint. Its really rare that you get to use paint straight out of the tube, but with flowers its almost certain that you will. I thought I would show some of my paintings that I have done of roses and an other flower.

Head over to Organize and Decorate Everything for a chance to win one of two of my Calendars. Giveaway ends Saturday.

They are finally here. I get to give you a "Blog Reader" discount. They normally cost $12.99, but I can sell them for $10.39. That's a great gift price and it won't last long. These calendars have a few different images than last years calendar so they are a little different. Please email epicart@mail.com and leave your name, number and best time to reach you so we can take your orders over the phone. For wholesale inquiries go to cedarfort.com.

This last week my family and I were able to go to Escalante for four days. LeAnn was so supportive, during the whole week, it helped me focus on just painting. I learned an awful lot from painting everyday from life. Light changes so quickly while painting that its debilitating. I found that if I painted a certain direction facing perpendicular plains, light changed less. Learning this was invaluable as the days went on. I then learned which things to paint first and which to paint last.


I did a 16 x 20 canvas for the competition, and I didn't like it as well as my smaller paintings that I did. I'm still trying to figure out how to make my bigger plein air paintings look as fresh as my smaller ones. Matt Smith is a wonderful example of how to paint well whether big or small. If you haven't seen Matt's paintings I would suggest to visit his site http://www.mattsmithstudio.com/ . He is so good at capturing the true colors of nature that you feel as if you were standing there on the spot with him.


So here are my small paintings, that I did. These are 8 x 10.

This was painted on the first day, about 5 miles west of Escalante in the evening. One think I loved about Escalante is that you don't have to go to the popular spots to find a beautiful scene to paint. I painted this about 30 ft from the highway. I loved how the light bounced around on the rocks and the ground. I also thought that the distant mountains popped the rocks in the foreground. I did a lot of pallette knife work on this one. If you want to see the pallette knife work just click the image to enlarge it. This painting was done in about 3 hours.


This painting was painted in the morning on the second day. I really enjoyed this because of the challenge of the composition. I usually use a dark pattern composition seperated by light spots. On this piece, on the other hand, I used the opposite approach. I'm still not sure if I really really like it, but its growing on me.

Clear back in my teens, I was able to go and learn from Jimmy Jones how to stretch a canvas. At the time, I didn't really understand how to do it without getting wrinkles in it. Luckily, later in life, when I worked at a framing shop I had the chance to figure out the fastest and best system for me. I did a lot of stretching back in those days and I'm thankful that I learned this technique.

The technique that I use isn't the same as you would probably be taught in school, but it works and its usually a lot faster.

So here are the tools that I use.

I use wire cutters, canvas grips, and a staple gun.


The first step in getting a canvas stretched is to put a staple in the center of each side, pulling the canvas tight. This isn't where I'm different in the traditional stretching technique.

The image illustrates the sequence.


While stretching literally hundreds of canvas' I found that they often wrinkled on the long side of the canvas. So to prevent this I would pull the canvas tight and put staples at the top of each corner temporarily, and not staple the staple in all the way.


I then decided to just do it every time. So here is where I put those four staples.


Now with the long side as tight as it can be, I staple the entire long side starting from the middle and working out on both sides of the middle staple. When I get near the corner, about 2 or so inches from it, I take out the temporary staple on that corner and finish the long side.

After finishing both long sides I do the same for the short sides, starting from the middle staple moving out.


The illustration below shows the order in which I do this.


Now the corners are somewhat tricky. This is how I handle them.


I put my finger on the corner and run it towards the middle of the short side. This creates the fold. I then pull down the top canvas parallel with the corner of the stretcher bars. Like hospital corners on your bedsheets.


Here is another angle of this step.




I then pull the canvas to the right/left towards the middle of the short side, and tuck it under the top canvas like so.




Well I hope this helps those who have found the traditional way of stretching frustrating. Make sure you post a comment if you have any questions.

I had my cousin ask a good question about what kind of pencils I use when I draw. After reading his question I decided to write a post just about the tools that I use while drawing. I'm all about keeping things as simple as they can be when I create something artistic. Whether its painting or drawing, I try to use as few tools as possible. So when I draw I only use three things.

1. Viva paper towels.


2. Number 2 pencil.


3. Kneaded eraser by sanford.


The Viva paper towels can be bought at about any grocery store out there.

The number 2 pencil can be bought at walmart in bulk. The thing I would watch out for is the number 2 pencils that are made with particle board instead of a solid piece of wood tend to be worse (don't go as dark). So when you are bying your pencils make sure you can see wood grain at the bottom of the pencils. The reason why I only use the number 2 pencil is because, back in the day when I was younger my dad went and bought me a huge set. I can't remember how big it was but I think it went from 8B to 8H or something like that. This is how they looked.




I thought that this would make my drawings all the better. But to my surprise I notice that the hard leaded pencils, the ones that were supposed to draw lighter, actually scratch my paper as I drew. I could never get rid of the scratches, even when I drew over it with a darker pencil. This drove me crazy. I could have a great drawing that was scarred by unwanted scratches. Now, someone may read this and say, well Jared just doesn't know how to use the pencil set. They are probably right, but I didn't have the patience to learn something that could be solved by just pushing one pencil softer for a lighter value and harder for a darker value.

And last but not least the wonderful kneaded eraser by sanford. This eraser is a life saver. I could not do a drawing unless I have this eraser. The reason why I depend on this eraser so much is that they last forever, they mold to any shape that you want, and they erase down to the white of the paper without smearing or leaving the color of the eraser behind. This eraser can be bought at misterart.com or dickblick.com. Check it out its worth it.

In order to make a good painting great, we need to know about edges. Edges are used to create the illusion of depth. We paint on two-dimensional surfaces, yet we are expected to make people believe it is 3-dimensional. This is troubling and difficult. So how do we do this? First we must understand how our eyes create depth.

The whole reason for having two eyes is to create depth. Our brain receives two images, one from each eye, and then overlays the images. One of our eyes is more dominant than the other, and that is why it doesn't seem to0 blurry. I have recreated, in photoshop, what our eyes do when looking at an object . The first image is just what a camera does, and the second image is what our eyes do. I snapped the photos as described in the illustration to the left. One photo for each eye's perspective. I took the left eye image and made it semi-transparent and laid it over my dominant right eye image. The focus of the two eyes is the duracell logo. You'll notice that the image is clear there and partly blurry everywhere else. This is how depth is created.


This is how the camara sees.


This is how our eyes' see.

This demostration was an hour long. I love to practice drawing by pausing movies. It gives you the time you need to practice with an ideal model that doesn't move, plus all of your family will recognize the actor, if it is drawn well, and that is always fun. Anyways this character is off Hildago. I picked it because of the strong lighting on the face. All of the photos are five minutes apart.


At the very beginning of every drawing I tone the horrible white paper. Nothing in my whole drawing is even close to being white, so I darken it by drawing horizontal strokes holding my pencil on its side like so.



(I got this picture off another blog, click it to see the blog.)


0 minutes
Its good to think that the white of the paper as being as bright as the sun. We rarely see things pure white, so we should avoid it.

0-5 minutes In this next step I quickly smoke in important shapes of the face that I can see. In this case it was the left eye (his right). I explained how I see shapes in a previous post titled "Values and Shapes". If you haven't read that yet, I would recommend it, or the next few stages might not make as much sense.
5-10 minutes
I continue on seeing and drawing the shapes of the face as simply as I can. This is not a time to think about detail. Its a time to focus on the beauty of simple shapes on a face.


10-15 minutes
I'm still blocking in the simplified shapes.

15-20 minutes
Still blocking in, no detail yet.

20-25 minutes
This is where it starts to get fun. I finally blocked in all the major shapes, and I can now start focusing on rendering the picture. While I draw I never let my fingers touch the paper, because the oil in our hands make the graphite unerasable. So I always have a nice Viva paper towell near by to use as my blending tool. And that is exactly what I have done on this stage. I smoothed out my drawing by gently rubbing the paper towell on my drawing. You'll notice that the drawing is more smooth than in the previous stage. I also use a kneaded eraser to get the different textures on the drawing.
25-35 minutes
I render out one item at a time. I don't jump around from thing to thing, because I feel like I loose focus if I do. Rendering it out as you go along helps fix initial drawing mistakes as well. In the previous stage you'll notice that the jaw on the light side is wider than it should be. I noticed a measuring error on the jaw and quickly changed it to be correct in this stage.

35-60 minutes
I continue rendering out the drawing until the end of the hour, and this is the result.

I hope this is helpful, if you have any questions or comments please post a comment.