Its been crazy busy as the snow continues to fall here in Pittsburgh.
 
Since we’re moving this month into our new house, we have
two houses to shovel and the typical delays accompanying a total of
some 30″ of snow in the last two weeks:

 
work that needs done,
stuff to be hauled away, stuff to be moved in, all waiting,
with the rest of this somewhat unprepared
small city, for a the roads to get better, the snow to stop falling,
a break in the action somehow so I can get on with what
I have to do.
 
Now the bright side is that what I have been able to do
waiting for the world to dig itself out is paint–
well, prep for painting and paint, taking a poor condition
second floor and making it sealed, clean and safe for us to sleep in.
 
People who’ve worked with me know I actually do get excited about an excellent
prep job, and I’m proud to say that given time alotted (actually scraped somewhat painfully from the childcare schedule),
and poor conditions we started with, the repaired and fresh walls and ceiling have really came out great.
 
so I’ll be posting some iPhone pix of progress sequence here next, but I want to
give a shout out to one of my favorite products here that just got written up in the
almighty New York Times.
 
I’ve already been using the brilliant, zero-VOC Transitional Primer from AFM Safecoat on
what I call “welding” all the different surfaces together into a decent “canvas” on which to paint, in this case:
 

• previously painted drywall
• previously painted plaster
• previously painted pine/waterbased
• previously painted pine/leadbased/
• raw poplar
• raw pine
• lots of acrylic caulking
• fresh drywall
• fresh mud
• waterbased catalyzed resin

AFM Safecoat paints are completely green, non-toxic products, and as the article points out, even smell good out of the can. They do a whole line of interior paints, and also a line of all-natural wood finishes that I’ve used extensively on custom hardwood picture frames the past few years in San Diego.
 
Highly recommended from personal experience and will be generally available in Pittsburgh soon.
 

Happy first post of the new year!

In addition to shoveling snow at two houses here in Pittsburgh, I’ve been working on web sites since the holidays, many different web sites. Some of them are even mine!

As I mentioned last fall, I’ve finally gotten all of my digital pictures on one drive, design/build/finishing portfolio pictures going back to San Francisco 1996 (these were actually print pictures I digitized in a big batch 5 or 6 years ago). Sorting through old pictures on the computer is interesting because they only show age through technical specifications, not fading, dust or deterioration of the paper.

Anyway its allowed me to find original full resolution files and complete folders of pictures on jobs long buried away on a CD, and show lots of detail in the galleries that was unavailable on any of my earlier portfolio websites. There are hundreds of pictures useful for both technical instruction and design idea generation when it comes to faux painting and other decorative painting treatments, so I’ve really just gotten started with 50 or so pictures about a handful of jobs posted so far.

The most developed example so far is a kids playroom designed with a circus theme I painted in an historic San Diego home in 2008. This project incorporated both faux finish and trompe l’oeil mural techniques, and so I listed different pictures with commentary in those two different galleries.

I also put some design work samples from this project on the custom art gallery page. These pictures help illustrate how a project like this comes to be something out of nothing before anyone tears into your house with buckets and brushes.

I’m not usually so thrilled over the all the great free Wordpress themes out there.

They almost all require hacking up to do what I want them to do and to match options and capabilities with clients’ specifc needs and requests.

So given that I’m my own most critical client, I’m writing again today about this theme and the nice results it gives for my three portfolios I’m in the process of reassembling on this site. I’ve now posted seven entries/pictures on each of the three– a mural gallery, a selection of faux painting and custom textured, embedded and polished plaster finishes, and a portfolio of custom art projects, which includes scenic painting, chalk painting, public art and custom/commissioned paintings.

Here’s a screenshot of the navigation page for the custom art gallery, only the actual page is twice as big- I did hardly any customizing to make this blog perfect for me. It has a big beautiful pictures-first look on the single post/picture pages that I love, too.

Custom art portfolio screenshot

Moving from San Diego to Pittsburgh has left the usual upheaval in the details, and I’ve spent my six weeks in PGH (since finishing the vertical blinds mural in SD) working to un-overturn the cart, if you will: finding new business, new space in which to work, finding old stuff I need right now (“what f$%^ing box is that in?”), etc.

One of the repeating moments here that have given me a crispy new angle on things is presenting my work (meaning, mural painting, faux painting and my custom art portfolio) to people who have never heard of me before, and also to people who don’t use the web in the same way that Southern Californians (for the most part) do.

One of the crispiest edges that started screaming suddenly for my attention was the photo gallery I’ve been using since switching to WordPress– I hated it all of a sudden, and dreaded the thought of loading it with more pictures in organized fashion just to hate the output (small size, too difficult to hack their code and customize, irritating navigation, etc).

I have tons of pictures from the last 15 years of making art of all kinds professionally, and never liked the presentation of my chosen few, let alone all of the process b-sides which make for interesting research and reference materials.

I’ve used a few different photo galleries over the years (yes I have a Flickr account, but not so fond of its limitations for my work stuff), even had one made custom without really ever resolving the issue and became acutely aware of this here when directing people to the website and not getting the exact response I was looking for….

so over Thanksgiving weekend I found a solution that gives me what I want visually in the AutoFocus Theme for WordPress. It allows me to make better use of WordPress’ online marketing capabilities and make way better use of the hundreds of thousand of unusual pictures I have from my various wall mural, faux painting and custom art projects dating back to 1995.

immediately put into action in three new photo galleries, these new pages will be both more comprehensive and more specific at the same time while always growing with new, never before seen full resolution pictures from my archives (searchable, too)

so check out the simplified navigation bar in the header up above, and the even more simplified photo galleries of my wall mural, faux painting and custom art portfolio.

When I had the Firehouse studio open for the South Park Walkabout back on October 3, I met a lot of interesting people and answered a lot of questions.

One I remember best is the girl who asked me, looking at the mural laid out on the floor, “How do you see the the whole picture?”

I think she meant something like “how do you see this whole process develop before you start, when nothing exists yet?”, understanding that some kind of guiding vision is required to bring a project like this to fruition, even if she couldn’t articulate it that clearly. (She seemed smart enough, but alcohol does alter our ability to communicate….)

Anyway, the answer is not “Because I’m a great artist” or even “Because I’ve done it before”, even though this second idea is closer to the mark than the first. All of my projects are so different, you can’t really say I’ve done any of them before.

What you can say accurately (I think) is that I’ve developed a process through doing lots of related project, and that by relying on the rigors of the process, I’m pretty confident that I can deliver the relatively unknown, even in the face of a potential client’s skeptical questions.

So this post is part summary of the mural project I’ve been documenting on this blog for the last six weeks and part illustrated explication of the process– so here we go.

One thing all of my different mural and faux painting projects do have in common is that they start with an idea, usually hatched by the client or the client’s design team, not me. My design services are the bridge to reality: how to develop an idea, no matter how wild or improbable it might seem at the outset, into a tangible possibility with a realistic plan of action to achieve.

In this case, the client had the idea to improve the white vertical blinds covering the spectacular views over downtown San Diego at night by painting them with the view itself– with some improvements. Here’s the job “site”: two 15′ sections of window creating one huge panaronama.

The client went even further in having a photographer (in this case my friend, Mike Brown) shoot the views from his building as a visual reference for what he wanted painted, and having the photos shot on a night when even the sky was how he wanted it in the final painting.

So my design of the mural started by pasting up a collage of Mike’s photos for each of the two windows to use as a reference and initial composition for the mural:

When I translate this approved composition into a scale drawing that corresponds to the actual dimensions of the site, the plan of painting action starts to take shape.

Once these line drawings were approved by the client, I expanded them to full size (more on that in future posts) and transferred them to the blinds for painting (the blinds were de-installed and “stretched” on the floor of the studio). The finished painted mural before installation:

So that’s one way in which I “see the big picture” when it doesn’t even exist yet, and know that I can bring into being from just an idea. Obviously, the client made this project pretty easy by knowing exactly what he wanted, and Mike made it easy with his terrific photography.

(I have more process pics an some video from this projectI’m working with right now and will publish soon.)

Yes, its been *really* cold in Pittsburgh since I arrived last Wednesday but its not just me– the natives all agree this its been January weather up until today, which was gorgeous autumn sun on the water, crisp skies and all the turning trees at their brightest, and I had the privilege of seeing the defending Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Browns at Heinz Field.

Its taken me awhile to recover from the drive across country and get acquainted with our life here in a new city, new house, etc. The kids are pretty happy despite having some flu stuff for the first time ever (Hunter already beat his) and we’ve been having fun reconnecting.

I have a basic office set up and my drafting table, and a pile of stuff to sort out, so first let me share some pictures of the final installation of the cityscape mural I just designed and painted on 32 feet of vertical blinds back in San Diego.

Since this paint treatment is designed for nighttime viewing and use, these pictures are a little anticlimactic– night time view pictures coming soon!