The Art Studio or Getting the Place Ready

The Ceiling and a View of the Back Yard....the artstudio

The past few days I have been focusing on the area on the lower level of my log house. My house sits on the Spirit River and is not that big, but the location is wonderful. The lower level has never been completely finished. The place had cedar tongue and groove for the walls and the ceiling was just untaped drywall. Also there is no molding or finishing touches. The washer and dryer are also under the stairs with no door. The other half of the lower area is a garage.

So for the last couple of weeks I have been trying to get the place turned into an art studio. Yesterday, I finally finished putting last coats of drywall goop on and had the surface ready to paint! If any of you have ever done taping of drywall, you will understand my great dislike for the goopy stuff and getting things just so.

I thought that I was incredibly smart finding an extension pole to put on the roller when I began painting the ceiling yesterday. This was after I went around the entire room painting along the wall/ceiling interface to make sure that I didn’t get paint on the wall. I found the extension pole on my mop that I use for the hardwood floors….perfect fit and no more climbing a ladder to paint!!! Anyway, I am now painting vigorously thinking that I am doing such a terrific job…..when quite suddenly SNAP…..THUMP……OOOOO……what the hell hit the back of my head??? Then knock – knock at the door….Fed Ex knocking …..aiyee. ….To top all else off, I am in a white T-shirt, braless, and a huge gob of white paint dripping down the center of the back of my head ….and barefoot (but who the hell is going to notice that). I am sure the Fed Ex guy is wondering who the nut case is who lives in the log house.

With my vigorous painting of the ceiling, there is a thing called leverage and a weak point on the “plastic” handle of the roller, I managed to snap the roller handle in two. The roller brush then came tumbling down, hitting me on the back of the head, running down my back before gingerly finding its place on the now white-streaked carpet floor.

Timing could not have been better for the Fed Ex guy as well. The only thing good about all of this is it wasn’t UPS as that guy is quite a piece of eye candy ………

Analytical Info or Google Analytics

Today I realized that when I redid the template for this blog, that I inadvertently lost the information that was written for tracking the statistics of this blog. Everyday I would check and everyday, there would be zero visits and no information. I finally put on a counter to see if there were indeed zero visits.

Guess what? When you change the template, make sure you also add the information that needs to be put in the html. Hopefully, there will at least be a few visitors that I know about.

Has anyone else done this? I really had no idea that there was a problem as the google analytics showed all was well.

Color Card Isolator

Today I spent the day reading one of my old art books called, "Fill Your Oil Paintings with Light and Color" by Kevin MacPherson. What an interesting book on color.

Some of the tips and techniques were very informative and I will try using them in my daily paintings. The first thing that I am going to try is a tool called the "magical color isolator". It is just a piece of white card with three holes punched into it. One side is white and the other side has three stripes on it: white, grey and black. The holes are in the middle of each of these tones.

The card is only one inch by three inches and easy to make. I plan on putting one together and trying it out. Color is relative to its surroundings and sometimes I find it difficult to figure out what the value of it is. If a person starts off wrong, the entire painting can suffer.

Almost forgot...to use the card just hold it about six inches from one eye....look at the color and tone. Paint what you see!!! This is important. Do not paint what you think the color is...that is what will screw everything up.

I plan on trying this out on my next painting for my daily painting blog.


One other thing that is also recommended is to paint the same subject in different light and with different backgrounds....I plan on trying this with on of my still life setups just to see what happens!