Notes (cont)


This is what I mean by simple plan of lights and darks. It really helps when you're setting up the painting.	Obviously, there is still a lot of drawing to do after the sketch, but I generally stuck to my plan for this commission, a historic view of a friend's house.

Exhibiting your work

No time is too soon to enter competitions or exhibit your work at sales and community art organizations if you want to. The sooner you get some rejection slips under your belt, the sooner you'll realize that you will get into some shows and not others, but rejections are not an absolute statement about the quality of your work. Above a certain level of competence, the final decision is more a reflection of the personal choices of the juror. The more times you enter, the more times you'll be accepted as well as rejected.

I don't remember who said it, but the quote was "I always learn what I can from the mistakes of others. I don't have time to make them all myself."
Here are a few tips, therefore, from my previous mistakes:

GOOD SLIDES - No matter how good your work is, you can't expect a juror to see that from a slide that looks like it was shot through a glass of spoiled lemonade. At the least, get or borrow a good 35 mm camera and shoot the slides in daylight. The best job, though, means using tungsten
film indoors with floodlights balanced for the film. I use two floodlight stands at about 45 degree angles to the painting, using 250 or 500 watt bulbs and 160T(easiest to get) or PRO 50 slide film. Shoot from a tripod and make sure the focus is good. Adjust the exposure up and down on the ones you think might be show-worthy so you can be reasonably sure of having a good exposure, especially on very dark or very light paintings. To make sure that you are lining up square with the painting, you can hang a mirror at the center of the painting. When you can see the camera looking back at you through the viewfinder, it is square. Remove the mirror and shoot. You can have digital files converted to slides if you like your digital photos better and you don't want to mess with slide film and developing. Just get the digitals the way you want them and send them to a photo lab to be converted to slides. Make sure the images are at least 1024 pixels on the longest side, and more if your camera will do it, so they read well as slides.

ORIGINAL WORK - Before you choose what to submit, look at your slides through a projector to make sure they're not too dark or light and compare your paintings for the best looking slide. I have seen some slides come in so dark or washed our that I knew the painter had never seen it through an actual projector or they would have never sent it. Remember, the jury will see the slides, not the paintings, and if the slide of your best painting is not good, do it over before you send it. Which painting has the most impact from across the room? Which painting shows a new way of looking at a common subject or does a good job of depicting an uncommon subject or mood? Is it a good slide with the right exposure and focus? You must imagine jurors looking at dozens of slides. When yours pops up, you want them to think, "I wish I'd painted that. What a good idea." And remember - some paintings just look better on a slide than others. You are being juried on your slide, not your painting. If you can't decide which painting to submit, pick the best-looking slide.

Your web page

You might want to consider starting a web site for yourself. It's really a good way to get some exposure and it's quite interesting to share your site with other artists on-line. Also, it's a good way for people who have purchased your paintings to see what you're doing now.

I'm not really an expert at this, but creating a web page can be fairly painless. I'm using Microsoft Frontpage now, which comes with an editor and makes it easy to organize and then modify your pages. They have several sample pages that you can start with. There are a lot of other programs, of course, but this one works for me and I know it well enough that I don't have to waste a lot of time editing my site.

I use a digital camera to add images, recently upgrading to a Canon G9, which is capable of 12 Megapixels, much more than you really need for the web or to submit digital entries to exhibitions. It cost a little over $400 and was a good deal for that kind of power. These images can be edited in a photo editing program and sized down. I usually use 72 dpi, which seems adequate for the web and doesn't take up a lot of space or take a lot of time to download when someone is visiting your site. I've read that you should have at least a 5 megapixel camera for this and shoot on the highest setting in order to get a good image that would project nicely on a slide screen. An interesting new development in digital photography is that you can take digital photos and have them converted to slides. I guess that would negate the argument in some art societies that slides can't be messed with, since people could manipulate the digital files and then convert them to slides. In normal slide viewing, you can't tell the difference between an original slide and one made from a digital image.