Vermont Oil and Watercolor Landscape Paintings

Each year I wait alllll   through the winter to finally have  a chance to go out and do some ala prima landscape paintings in the summer. The same was true of this year but unfortunately I never found a chance so far this summer to go out in the field and paint on location. A few weeks back i did finally take a bit of time to do a quick watercolor on location.

Then finally over the past couple of weeks i carved out some time from my current children's book to do a couple of oil landscape paintings of local vermont scenes. Both are done from photos though. The first is a barn in lyndonville vermont.

 I will have them for sale pretty much as soon as they dry and i can get  a frame on them. I'm not yet sure where i will have them for sale but considering local shops or the hospital, which displays local artists on their walls. This second one is from the top of Burke Mountain in East Burke Vermont looking out over Willoughby Gap and Willoughby Lake in Westmore Vermont. I've hiked Mnt. Hor, Mnt. Pisca and Blad Mnt. all visible in this image.

Maple Tree Watercolor Painting Kirby Vermont

   This past weekend I finally had the opportunity to get my watercolors out for my first ala prima landscape painting of the season! I have to give credit for the inspiration and idea for this piece to my wife.

 I'll likely eventually post this for sale on my etsy store but for now I'm going to get a few more paintings done first so i can photograph them and post them all at the same time. I currently have seventeen items posted to my etsy store, various landscape originals and prints.

 https://www.etsy.com/shop/matthewgauvin?ref=si_shop

A little bit of the process work.

Dog Portrait, Characature, Landscapes etc.

These past few months have taken my art in unexpected directions as I venture into areas I hadn't given much consideration to previously.  I'm currently working on a new family portrait image which I don't yet have samples of. It's another one of my "imaginative Portraits" that I began doing a few years back. The difference with this one being that it focuses more heavily on the portrait aspect than the previous two images did.

    I also recently agreed to do a straight forward family portrait for a friend of my fiance. This came about as a result of him having seen the wedding invitations I illustrated for my upcoming wedding. I don't think I've ever done caricatures before either but for some reason this seemed like the natural thing to do for my wedding invitations. Not sure how that happened but they were tons of fun to illustrate and everyone is saying they love them!

I have also been putting a lot of work into making a portfolio of landscape paintings for the East Burke Fall Foliage Festival coming up on Sept. 29th in East Burke, VT. I've done landscapes in the past but never to the extent that I'm currently doing. I'm hoping to write a blog post this week displaying many of the images I painted for that. I'll have postcards and prints as well as the original art for sale.

Just today I finished painting a quick pet portrait I did as a reward for a kickstarter campaign for one of my books.

I've also been talking with a friend about doing a hand painted sign for his business. You might think that all of this is a result of not being able to find my typical children's book work. Actually I haven't really had an issue with that yet. I think it has more to do with just needing a bit of a break from those longer projects. All of these other avenues have been making me ask the question though. Should I in fact offer some of these other forms of art as a service? or should I stay focused in one area of art and try to perfect my skills therein? I don't know if it would make sense for me to have a children's book project going in one corner, pet portraits in one, landscapes in another and hand painted signs in yet another. In fact I know that would be a disaster and not good for my sanity as I currently have the messiest studio of all time and have nine folders for different clients on my desktop. I welcome any advice or comments from other artists who may have experience with these sorts of things in their own practice. I do have a feeling I'll keep doing some of these random projects on the side but will probably keep with the children's art as my main thing.

Taste The Rainbow!

        This past week I was at the Laundromat keeping my fiancé company when the vending machine called my name in no uncertain terms and with a very distinct glow, faintly trickling past my right eye. I vigorously walked in the direction of the faint hummm and was encountered by these bizarre colored disks in a red package with large white letters. They were small, strange, hard and shinny with a large white letter on each of the disks as well. I once saw E.T. Eat a substance similar to these on TV., back when I still wore those umpa loompa jammies with the zipper down the front and slippers sewn onto each leg. Yet those were very different than these. I knew these couldn't belong to him because the letter on them was an "S" and not an "E" or a "T" . Confounded I dumped some out onto the table in front of us and was only slightly surprised to see them roll around and form themselves into a crop circle sort of pattern before my very eyes. I ate one and then another. They kept making their way from the bag, to my stomach with such ease but not without a good deal of chewing along the way. That was my favorite segment of the journey as each bunch, when chewed, would release an assortment of fruity flavors upon contact with my tongue.

      I eventually realized the bag would soon disappear and no trace of the flattened spheres would remain as proof of my encounter. Of course saving some aside was out of the question as each subsequent sample called out in a distinct vocal pitch increasingly fine tuned to my inner longings for fruity substances. Thinking quickly on my feet . . . I got nothing. But then Barbie told me I should do a painting of them. And so after about fifteen minutes of moving the pieces around, looking through a viewfinder, I came up with the absolute best composition I could possibly muster under the circumstances. Then Barbie picked them all up and rolled them onto the table top, like a pro at a craps table in Vegas, and I painted them!

      So it is without further ado my dear blog readers, facebook friends, fans (well it sounded good), and family members that I present to you this 5"x6" watercolor rendering as proof of the alleged encounter with Martian space disks. Take it or leave it as you please. It is my contention that these colored disks are in fact sent from Mars in an attempt to search out and gather information from among the most astute and learned of all humans (clearly their navigation software is a bit glitchy) on the planet earth in an attempt to learn our strengths and weaknesses, so that the whole of Martian kind might stand some small chance against us in the ensuing war over their home planet. You've been warned!

One Week With an Illustrator in The Studio

   This week is one of those rare weeks where I get to feel the joy of finishing off a few projects and packaging them up to send out to clients. Sooooo Happy!!! Most of my projects stretch on for months on end so whenever I finish a project it is a mixture of relief, excitement, exhaustion, and paranoia that they will come back for yet another revision on something.  It's often like building a skyscraper with an indeterminate number of floors.

   I began the week with some more color and border samples for "Pigs Under the Post Office"

Continued with some e-mail correspondence with a repeat client with whom I will be starting another imaginative family portrait.  I posted images to my artwanted.com portfolio, filled out my application for the East Burke Fall Folliage Festival, read art blogs, listened to art related podcasts, and talked to the graphic designer for my "A Cloudy Day " book. That book is finally going to print!!!!

I then found out that a book I illustrated the cover for in 2010 has finally been published! So I sent a congratulatory postcard along to that client.

 I was finally able to make some time to do the absolute final revisions for the Bull Illustrations. I also got to use my "new" printers full 13"x19" printing capabilities for the first time : )  $82 for the ink and photo paper!

Then I had half a day to work on the final line drawing for my wedding invitations I'm doing the illustrations for. As much as I would like to show the progress for that, I really want to keep it a surprise for now but will definitely unveil that eventually.

The second half of the day I took the time to do an original watercolor painting of the turtle from "Samantha Loses the Box Turtle" which is a commissioned reward for the kickstarter campaign. Complete with a certificate of authenticity and free postcard samples of my art to go along with all of the other cool prizes they received from the author.

I started this week on a  high from having finished the final art for "Samantha hatches the Chicken Egg". One of the full page illustrations below.

Today and tomorrow I will be finishing off the week by mailing/delivering the art, writing this blog post, probably updating my website and blog with my two new books available, "Samantha Loses the Box Turtle" paperback version and" "Hello Jesus, it's Jeanne... Again". Then I will transfer the final drawings for my pig book onto the final painting surface to prepare for a full week of painting next week!

Pocharde Box for Plein Air Watercolor Painting

It's been a while since my last post as I realized this post will be my one hundreth POST!!!! I found it to be a bit intimidating to approach this post as I didn't want to just keep posting recent art. I've been wanting to find the time to post informational and interesting posts. There is sooo much I have learned over the years to make my process faster, easier, and just with making art in general that I would like to share with others. Unfortunately those kinds of posts take a lot more preparation and effort. One day I suppose I will get to some of my ideas for those.
     For today I decided to show a bit of behind the scenes for my materials I take with me when doing plein air watercolor paintings. In the past I've done alla prima oil paintings which would be a completely different, heavier more complex set up than this. At some point I will likely do a post on that process. When painting in oil I plan on taking the whole day to hike out into a field and stay set up for atleast a few hours. The light changes a lot over that time, so sometimes I end up going back a few times if needed.

Above is a picture of all my supplies in the general setup I use while painting. In this case I was sitting on the ground so I used my larger wicker paint box which I believe was a fishing basket I picked up cheap at a yardsale.

Generally I paint while sitting on a  tree stump, rock, or chair etc. in which case I tend to use the smaller paint box (#2) which sits on my lap. 3) sometimes I tape the paper to the back of a watercolor paper pad which can be proped up inside the wicker basket. Other times I tape the paper to the upper inside cover of the #2 box. 4) I generally bring extra water so I can have clean paint water whenever needed. 5) Is a small set of watercolors which has four little mixing areas in the lid and a convenient thumb bracket on the base. 6) I generally bring my camera as most of the watercolors I do are with the intention of possibly turning them into larger oil paintings later in the studio. Taking pics will help me to get extra information that may be needed for that process. 7) masking tape holds the paper down so it doesn't curl or buckle while painting. 8) a pencil sharpener. 9) pencil to sketch out the image before starting to paint. 10) I find that those little chicken bullion cube containers work great for holding the paint water and the lid seems to be water tight from my experience. 11) a variety of brushes and scrap paper to test colors.  I forgot to number the additional paint pallet I sometimes bring with me, shown in the pic. I also generally bring sunglasses which help me to see values easier. It's also to have a viewfinder cut into a pice of card stock which helps to frame the image. Lastly you'lle need paper towels to clean bushes in between colors.

The resulting painting for this particular outing is shown above. For me the interesting elements to this scene were the lines and shape of the landscape. I also tried to capture the warmth of the morning sun. As I was painting, a woman was walking her dog and stopped by for a short chat with my fiance and her dog. She saw me painting and it wasn't until she left that I found out she was the owner of this particular house.

A few more watercolors I've done over the past couple of weeks. I do enjoy doing these, but I also find this medium to be a bit frustrating at times as some things just need more time to do properly with watercolor.These same paintings with oil would have been probably four times longer to do though.

Samantha Cover : book Two : Part Three

part one : thumbnails and rough sketches
part two : Layout color choices

I'm pretty sure I finished the cover for the second book in the samantha series today. Just in time to announce the kickstarter campaign for the first book. The goal is to be able to raise $500 to use towards costs associated with printing and promotion of "Samantha loses The Box Turtle" as a paperback book. It's currently only available as an e-reader and has done quit well with some requests for hard copies of the books. Check out the kickstarter campaign page to learn more! 16 days to go!http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2016518480/samantha-loses-the-box-turtle

    The cool thing about supporting the printing of this book through the kickstarter campaign is that no matter how little you donate, you will get goodies in return. At different donation levels you get prizes ranging from copies of the e-book, copies of the paperback book, stickers, an original piece of art by me!, or you can even have yourself or your kid written into the third book in the series!  In many cases you would really just be donating the amount that it would typically cost to buy the book or e-book anyway.

                          

 The sample below was my first draft of the cover on a grey scale layout. The author and I agreed that the background cupboards were too dark and her face was painted a bit too differently than the first book. So I adjusted those elements with guache as well as a few other tiny details.

 Below I've posted the cover of the first book in the series. Which is currently available as an e-reader on Amazon.com and elsewhere. You can click ont he link on the left of this blog to buy the book on amazon.

Pond Watercolor Sketch

Over the past weekend I had a bit of time for a couple more small watercolor sketches. I'll probably be posting a few of these every so often. They are all are around 5"x6" and took about 15-30 min. In many cases I consciously simplify objects to favor having a finished sketch in my allotted time rather than a more detailed unfinished sketch.

        

Samanth Cover Design: Book Two

Part one cover design process for first book in this series
Part two for cover design process of first book in this series

        Today I finished off the rough draft of the final cover art for the second book in the "Samantha" Series authored by Daisy Griffin.

As the book cover is the most important illustration in the whole book I tend to start with as many thumbnail sketches as I can come up within a reasonable amount of time. Usually I shoot for ten or more. In this case we had a rough idea of the layout we wanted as we would keep in line with the first book in the series.

This was a hard cover to narrow down as I liked number twelve showing the glowing light coming from inside the incubator, most people polled seemed to like number nine which I also liked, we then started with number eight which the author liked. Really I would have been happy with about half of these concepts.

At this point the author didn't like seeing the eggs and a hatched chic in the same image and preferred number six. So I did a rough from that thumbnail.

from here the author made More suggestions and we went into a more finished sketch.

Then color samples and into the final art seen at the top of this post.

Watercolor Landscapes: North Hero Vermont

For more of my Vermont Landscapes got to :  Oil Landscapes   , Watercolor sketch

I spent the past weekend with my fiance at a friends camp in North hero Vermont, enjoying the summer. I found the time to squeeze in some small watercolor landscapes during my stay on the lake. I enjoyed it so much that I'm now considering spending a few days throughout the summer to make up a  ton of these miniature landscapes all over vermont and make a zazzle store specially devoted to vermont postcards, calendars and the like. I still hope to work in atleast a few oil landscapes this summer to have in local businesses and will likely make that  a priority, while doing these watercolor sketches when time is tight, perhaps some of them could become more finished oil paintings later.

Beagle Watercolor Sketch

I've decided to try and bring my watercolors and sketch pad with me more often as I find myself away from the studio more and more these days. In my adventures with my fiance I've been in all sorts of places I would have loved to sketch or paint whether it be up in the backwoods on her four wheeler overlooking a beautiful farm scape at sunset, out on the water in kayaks observing the natural beauty of waterfalls and the powerful arched gnarly trees that lean out over the water, snowshoeing through snow laden forests and fields, or the long road trips that have carried us into many wonderful sunsets. I've seen more wild animals with her in the past few months than I have seen in my entire life here in Vermont. Moose, deer, foxes, raccoons, peacocks (well on a farm), rabbits, beavers, geese, fish and the like. So finally after many years as a practicing artist I've decided to get better at sketching. Here's my first go at it!  This is Biscuit who was kind enough to pose for me Saturday after a long day of helping Barbie at her weekend job. I'm thinking this was about a fifteen minute sketch, 4"x6" watercolor.

He Looks just like YOU!

Whenever I have a spare moment I enjoy looking through other artists blogs and seeing all of their work,  process and studies. Recently I realized that some of my favorite blogs do nothing more than just post some of their finished artwork with a simple title and maybe a short description for what inspired the piece. I then realized I very rarely post finished art on my blog or atleast none of my newer stuff. I've done a bunch of finished book covers recently that I posted but have left out so much of my other art. So now I'm going to start posting some finished artwork every now and then for those who never have the chance to make it to my actual website. You can allways view more there http://www.matthewgauvin.com/

    This first one is from the book "The Little Boy Without a Name and Without a Birthday". I recently posted this image on my artwanted page and got a comment that it looks like a norman Rockwell! LOL, Yeah, maybe when he was ten and just starting to paint! But he was deffinetly one of my first inspirations, so it was fun to be compared to him.
          I also keep hearing that the little boy looks like he was modled after myself, BWAHAHAHAHA. Seriously had about five different people say that. I never wear red, don't have red hair, I'm 27 with thinning hair. But I do have glasses and messy hair and used to be extremely skinny and I used to have blue shoes, so I can see where they are coming from.
         I find it quit interesting that the author of the book actually has people telling him that the little boy looks like him (he wears glasses too). The funny thing is that I have often felt a character looks like me a bit but in those instances I spend hours trying to resolve the issue,haha. I'm thinking of one character in particular for my "Samantha Loses the Box Turtle" book where no matter how much I changed the character, I kept feeling like it looked like me. I have  a feeling this is a somewhat common thing amongst artists, as I have noticed it in other artists work. Sometimes it's because we use photoreferences of ourselves as a starting point but mostly I think it's simply because we are our own most familiar face. Some of us even dare look at ourselves in the mirror every day!
      As artists, the way we draw is to observe nature and try to mimic it in some feeble way, even when we're drawing something imaginairy like a monster or a talking train or unicorn, dragon etc. we are allways going to rely on our minds reference library taken directly form nature itself. I've allways wondered how a person blind since birth might go about the task of drawing various things, if overnight they were given the ability to see, to draw extremely well and weren't alowed to leave the room or look at other artists work. I think in a way that's a bit of a conundrum as I can't imagine an artist being able to draw well, if they don't have some sort of knowledge base for what exists in the world. You can't draw a cat if you've never seen one and you can't make a dragon look like a dragon if you don't share a common understanding of the various things that make it a dragon. However I do know that there are a wide range of possible ways to draw any given creature and still have it remain recognizable. Will Terry has an excellent video about how to design characters on his folio academy website which illustrates this point perfectly. Regardless, every artist has to start with something. We don't create out of nothing. God is the only artist in all of human history who has ever created out of nothing. Many artists draw images from their head, but their head is filled with everything they've ever seen in life and observed in nature. We don't create in a  box no matter how talented we may be. I think even Feank Frazetta would have to attest to that if pushed far enough.

Watercolor Landscape: Calm before the Storm

There was plenty to be done in preparation for Hurricane Irene. In particular I was concerned simply because I had no idea what to expect, so I didn't know if I needed to put boards over my studio windows to protect my art, should I pick the rest of my tomatoes even though there are about thirty green ones? should I put sandbags at the base of the garage door to protect my fathers camaro that we just had brought up to this house?, or the 48 oldsmobile that has been sitting here for years? In the end I just picked up the larger objects in the yard and didn't worry too much about all the extra stuff. I did however find myself at the church helping the nights of Columbus cut down a bunch of brush and trees and tear down and old fence. There's nothing quit like a gathering of ten men with trucks, chainsaws, weedwhackers a heavy duty chain and an old wheathered fence. Whoever put those fence posts two and a half feet into the ground, to insure they wouldn't fall over, certainly didn't have us in mind as the ones who would be ripping them out!

     Before all of the fun began, I found myself with an hour or so of quiet misty morning light in the church parking lot alone, as I had to drop my mom off to work early in the day. So I brought my watercolor sketching supplies along and did the image above. As this was one day before Hurricane Irene I'm calling it "The Calm Before the Storm". It was an interesting feeling to be working on such a calm scene a day before destruction and chaos was predicted to hit the area.