Scraps of Paper, Extra Paint

Last year I did a painting for my granddaughter's room. I ended up with a lot of unused pink paint. So I found an old, unused sketch book and did some quick, silly pictures. (I still had my granddaughter in mind.)

Soon I was out of paint, but I still had many pages left in the sketchbook. I gave myself a new assignment. Fill all the pages of the sketchbook with quick illustrations of whatever was in my head.

Using old acrylic paint collected through the years, I set out a limited number of odd colors and worked until the color on the palette was gone. It took a few sessions, but soon the pages were filled.

Here are a couple more from the first batch, using pink and black paint. You can see a lot of them on this page.

Almost Christmas

Supply truck

It's good to take pride in your work.

And speaking of fishing...

Large Catfish

Many years ago I used to meet my friend Micah early in the morning so we could go fishing. We would drive up to the Susquehanna river, just above where the Chesapeake Bay begins. Wading out into the river we would bait our hooks with small perch and heave them downstream. If we were lucky, and our bait was lively we would haul in an occasional striped bass. If the bait got old and tired, large catfish would become interested.

One such morning I sent my tired bait downstream for one more try. After a bit of a wait I felt a good tug. I yanked back on my line and knew right away I had something huge. I wasn't at all sure what I had, but suspected it was a big, old catfish. I could tell by the slow steady fight. After a good bit of careful pulling and reeling I finally got him close. It was the biggest, ugliest catfish I had ever seen. His head was battle scarred and he looked mean.

I didn't have a wagon to haul him away.

Cows designing at night

Seems like some of the best design, music, painting, illustration...art in general is produced late in the evening.

Even the cows aren't afraid to jump over the moon at night.

Design is about cleaning up after yourself

Design, painting, illustration, and writing  is all about making a mess of a first draft, then cleaning it up later.

Apples

Spring is here. So last weekend I did some googling to see how I should trim my apple trees. After some clipping and chopping I think my orchard is ready for the summer. (All three small trees).

While I was at it, I took care of my vineyard (two vines).

Last year one of my grapevines did really well. (It produced about four bunches of grapes.) One Saturday afternoon I picked a sample to see if they were ready. Ellen and I both agreed that they needed a few more days. A couple more days passed and I checked again. Every single grape was gone. Critters...

I don't mind sharing, but hopefully this fall I'll be like this guy with some apples to inspect.

Baseball Season

I hear that some folks are playing preseason baseball in Florida.

When I was a young lad, I played baseball for two seasons on a pony league team. I think it was the summer after my seventh and eighth grade years.

I played in the right field (when I played), long before I knew why some kids were always put in the right field. I remember standing in the field, trying to say the chants that all real baseball players new how to say. Something like, "Come-batta-batta-batta." Seemed pretty silly to me.

When I wasn't sitting on the bench, or in the right field (trying to pay attention), I occasionally got a chance to bat. My batting average was consistent, and easy to remember...zero, 0, also know as .000.

Fortunately I learned to do other things with my life. But I do wish I could be in Florida for spring training. (I would skip the baseball.)

Walking a dog.

Walking a dog. I hear it’s good to do. If you have a dog.

We don’t have a dog. But we have been dog-sitters before. And at those times, I walked a dog.

Actually, my family had a dog when I was a kid. And sometimes we would take her for a walk. She was a beagle. She constantly wanted to tear off after every little distraction she saw. Not at all like the dog pictured here. The pup pictured here looks thrilled to be out and about, though it does not appear that the guy in the coat feels the same way.

Sipping coffee*

Drinking a cup of coffee. The screw-top lid not quite secure. A bit dribbles quickly down my chin and into my open collar. My cologne for the day.

 *Author's note. The cups in this picture do not have lids. I learned to make short hair dots on the sides of their heads from Joe Glorioso. Thanks Joe.

Gh Trucking

I suppose I could try a different career. Driving a moving truck for example. But that would mean lifting boxes and furniture. And probably a bit of packing up of other people's stuff.

I don't like to lift heaving things. Except maybe when I lift myself up from my chair to go home from work. But I was impressed when I saw some guys installing a new washing machine. They had these strap contraptions that went over their shoulders and down under the machine. They then just had to stand up from a slight crouching position and walk it into place. Cool invention.

Another thing I like is those disk things you can get at a hardware store. You put them under the legs of heavy furniture. Then, all you have to do is slide the piece to the new place you want it.

I think I will stick to drawing heavy things.

Making dough with dough

Another drawing, another post. Making designs with my pictures.

I like baked goods.

Things you shouldn't do

Fortunately the wise designers of the power outlet made the plug area smaller than fingertips. Otherwise, boys might try to insert fingers. Unfortunately, boys will try to find other items that do fit. Nobody got hurt, just a scorch mark on the wall. Don't tell anyone.

Newspaper

I keep staring at this thing, the headlines don't change, the pictures don't move and Apple doesn't force me to look at a banner ad with no close option. But there's something about the convenience of a newspaper. Read it. Cut it up for ransom notes. Line a bird cage with it. Wrap a fish with it. Use it as a background for a painting.

You can't do that with a yahoo page.

Zoo Pictures Revisited

The last time I set a up a site to show some of my wildlife pictures the web was still pretty young. Folks back then liked things like frames and tables for designing pages. The images have aged better than my code base, so I decided it was time to do something new.

This time I decided to use some of the the features of html5 and css3. I also used jquery to build the navigation interaction. If you click one of the squares at the top right of the screen, the script in the background checks the number of the square you clicked and then finds and shows the image that corresponds to that number. A good puzzle for my small brain.

To finish it off I tried to make it responsive, so it looks pretty good on different size screens.

I hope it works well for you. You can see it here.

Content Management with Joomla

As part of my quest to control the world, or, at least my bits of the web, I wanted to learn more about content management systems.

I have used content management systems extensively, both for personal and work sites. This blog for example is written in the Blogger content management system. It provides a lot of the things I like:

• I can add post anywhere, from any platform
• All the new posts are styled automatically
• I can choose when to deploy the new content, if at all
• I can choose when to retire content
• I can share the content with other sites

I have used others too, Liferay and Wordpress for example. I have learned a lot about manipulating the css and javascript to control the presentation in those systems.

But what I want to learn more about is controlling the back end nuts and bolts of a content management system. Controlling the actual templates and structures of sites built in content management systems.

So I installed joomla in a subdirectory of my regular web site. And then, with the help of a book or two, and a lot of good information on the web, I learned how to build up the basic components of the underlying joomla template. It took me a while to understand it, but now I get it!

You can see the site in it's current form here. I will continue to add content as I have time.

Puzzle

Sometimes I don't know what to say.

The Paper Cup Factor

I wonder, do companies like Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts consider the flavor variable introduced by the paper cup they choose to use when serving beverages? I know from experience that, in my opinion, Starbucks coffee is served way too hot for paper cups. Even with a paper sleeve, it has to be close to boiling point. Since I already dislike Starbucks coffee, this is not a point in their favor. Though I guess the flaming temperature of their coffee does make sense since it tastes burnt.

Here is a picture of paper coffee cup taste tester.

Same Old City, New Site

Quite a few years ago I built a site to show a bunch of paintings I did in and around Baltimore. It was pretty cool! I used Flash!

Well, times change, technologies change and so the page had to change. I rebuilt it with html and instead of using Flash, I built the animations with jquery.

This is way easier to develop, deploy and maintain. And the paintings still look pretty good! You can see it here.

Here's what it looks like:

Tablets

Everyone is talking about tablets. Are they just for consuming, as many say? Or are they useful for real work? Personally I like my computer. Easier to type on, easier to design, illustrate and develop on. But in the mean time, here's a picture of guy trying to use his for work. Of course, it was done on a full computer with Adobe Illustrator, based on a preliminary sketch I did with good old paper and pencil.

Practicing the Alphabet

Part of being an artist is that I tend to draw a lot. Much of the fun of making art is in the making. And sometimes I want to make things, but I don't want to wait around for great inspiration. In those cases, I know I can use an old stand-by excuse to draw or paint, like the alphabet. (I've heard of some artists returning to themes like rural Pennsylvania with brown paint, or sad European clowns with blue paint.)

As a graphic designer, I also need to practice designing things. And as a web designer, I need to practice making web things too.

As an excuse to draw something, I did ink illustrations of each of the letters of the alphabet. To design something, I made a web page to display them. And for a web design project, I made it with one html page that uses jquery to change the images when a letter is clicked. Plus, the layout will change if it is viewed on a small screen.

Go ahead and have a look!

Trash or Treasure?

Sometimes things break. And sometimes when things break, it isn't immediately apparent what should done with the broken item. (I now have two broken sump pumps, should I just put them in the trash?)

I imagine the owner of the old lawn mower in this painting may have intended to fix it at some point. Maybe it was kept for spare parts. Maybe the owner just hasn't gotten around to properly disposing of it yet.

And what about those tires?

It's funny how some of the most interesting things to paint are things that really shouldn't be there in the first place. The grass needs to be cut, but the lawn mower is broken. The walls haven't been painted in years. The roof looks rusty and leaky. But it looks interesting!

If it was all cleaned up, I wouldn't have noticed it, or painted it.

Broken things have stories to tell. Brand new things, cleaned up things don't have stories yet.

Manhole Covers

I recently put up a page to showcase some photos I've taken through the years of manhole covers. I combined the photos with some special effects in Photoshop to give them a bit of a posterized look. I built the page with some html, css and jquery.

Take a look and tell me what you think.

Fell's Point Front Steps

Had a great time a couple months ago painting with a lot of my watercolor friends at a Frank Webb workshop. This painting was from a photo I took a few years ago while hiking around Federal Hill and the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. I like the steps and the bricks.

Neighbor's Yard in Autumn

The neighbor has a nice shed that I can just see the top of when I look over the roof top of my own shed. The autumn colors are fun. This a demonstration from class.

Speed Boat on Deep Creek Lake

Used a bit of masking fluid for the water behind the boat, and the reflections on the water. It was a beautiful day.

Catonsville Rooftop (I think)

I paint a lot. So I accumulate a lot of paintings. I usually stack them up and forget about them, but sometimes I take pictures of them first. Then I stack them up and forget them and forget about the photos too.

I see a pattern...Here's one of the ones in a stack somewhere. It was from a photo I took of a rooftop in Catonsville as I recall. Let me know if you have seen this one before. I have a plenty more...

Ghost Town

Yes, I've been distracted lately. Being a grandpa is very time-consuming! But I've still been painting a lot. And teaching some painting classes. Below is a quick study I did from a photo mom and dad provided a while back. Kind of looks like an old abandoned town. Painted on crappy Canson student grade paper. (Here's a tip for all you budding painters out there, get good paper.)

Pictures for Noah's room

Grandboy Noah hadn't officially arrived yet last Christmas, but we were all getting ready for him. Part of the preparation was getting his room ready. And part of getting his room ready was to make sure he had some pictures to hang on his wall. So here are Noah's first pictures from his Grandpa Bob. I don't know if he has noticed them yet.

(For my fellow art nerds, they were done with acrylic on canvas.)

The Roman Bath

A long time ago I had the opportunity for a short visit to Rome. The one in Italy. While there, like any good tourist, I took a lot of pictures. When I got back I did quite a few paintings from the photos. Paintings that are now scattered to various locations.

One of them was an ink drawing with watercolor. Ellen always liked that one, so she had me frame it and she put it up in our powder room.

She asked me if I could do some small ones to go along with that one, so I looked through those old photos and found some likely candidates. Below are the three the I did for her. They are each about 5 x 7 inches. The nice thing about old photos from ancient ruins is the subject matter doesn't look dated! I framed them and gave them to her for Christmas.

A corner of the entrance to the Vatican circle.

A street adjacent to the Vatican

The Colosseum

Linoleum Block Prints

I've always alike the look of wood and linoleum cut prints. And I have always wanted to spend some time doing them. So last summer I set aside some time to make some.

I started by looking through my sketchbooks and picking some likely candidates. I drew them roughly on the linoleum then drew them in with ink and brush. (Actually, it may have been one of those pens that have a brush-like tip.) Once the drawing was dry, a day or two later, I started cutting away the parts that I didn't want to print. This part took longer than I expected, 3 or 4 days or so. I'm usually a watercolor guy, I like to finish things quickly, so this was already stretching my patience. Finally, I rolled on some ink and hand-printed 10 or 12 of each. It took a few tries to get the right amount of ink, and the right pressure for printing. And in some cases, after the first test print I had to cut out a few more parts of the block and reprint.

Below is one of the samples. I made a web page for them, which you can see at www.robertjcoe.com/lino/.

Building the page was another interesting project. At work I've been learning a lot about using jquery, so I built this one with basic html and css. Then I added all the interactivity using jquery. I used it to add the links that show and hide the images. And I used it to control the navigation. The right and left links are actually just one line of html. With jquery I was able to change the action of the navigation based on which image that is displayed. Very educational indeed!

Laurel Art Guild Workshop

Back in November 2011 I was invited to do a one day workshop for the Laurel Art Guild. I've done a lot of workshops over the years in addition to my watercolor classes. It's always a lot of fun and workshops give me the chance to meet some new people.

This workshop was a little different. I was asked to show how I use acrylic painting instead of traditional watercolor. For the first demonstration I did a painting in my usual wet into wet method, but intentionally covered areas of paper that I normally would have left white, in the lower part of the sky in particular. Then, after letting the first round of color dry, I added white back into the areas to reclaim the whites and lightened some areas by mixing white in with color. That example is shown below.

For the second painting, I treated it just as if it were a traditional watercolor painting. Using the colors transparently, with wet into wet washes and glazing. No white paint was used in this one. Here is the second painting.

The first two paintings were done on Arches 140 lb cold press paper. I also happened to have with me a pre-stretched canvas, so while everyone else was painting I did another in a more traditional oil-type technique. I started by blocking in with transparent color, covering the entire canvas, then as it dried, adding darks and lights with heavy paint. Quite a bit different from the light touch required in the others. And it takes more effort to move the color around because it doesn't flow like a puddle of color. Here it is.

I had a great time and I think the others in the class did too. Thanks to everyone from the Laurel Art Guild who attended that day and thanks to Donna Aldridge for inviting me!

Almost Gone

I finally got a chance to photograph the painting of the barn mentioned earlier. Sister-in-law Cheryl, who lives just up the road, tells me the decline of this structure has as much to do with scavengers looking for building materials as it does with the weather. It's still fascinating study in decline, since the first time I saw it, and painted it, it was in good shape.

I think it's more interesting now!

Bales of Hay, or Not

As I think I've mentioned before, Grandpa Gilpin had a farm.

When I was a kid, my brothers, sister and I thought the farm was the greatest place on earth. We were small town kids wishing we could live on a farm too. Everything about the place was magical. The cows, the cats, the fields and forests. We even thought the chores were cool!

One of the events we looked forward to every year was hay baling time. Grandpa would cut the hay, wait a day or two, then turn it over with a big, tractor-pulled rake, then turn it over again to get it as dry as possible. If all went well, we would then go out to bale it. Grandpa would hook up the baler to the tractor, and a wagon to the baler. When everything was ready, my dad, my brothers and my uncle Dave, (just a year older than me) would climb on the wagon and off we would go.

Grandpa would drive along the rows letting the baler munch up the fresh-cut hay, and we would wait on the wagon while the baler pushed rectangles of hay out the back for us to grab and stack on the wagon.

Grandpa's bales were proper bales, perfectly sized for a person to pick up and stack. So when I see these gigantic roles of hay as shown here I also think that they did it wrong. I can't imagine what we would have done if Grandpa made these enormous things. I've never met anyone who worked on a farm that produced these kind of bales. What did the kids do?

Waiting for the inevitable

Another favorite site captured in paint. This one is on the corner across the road from Cheryl and Scott's house in upper PA. An overrun barn, left to stand or fall by itself. Lonely but for the birds, weeds and critters who still find it worthy of shelter.

Imagine my surprise when I found it, a year later, collapsed except for the silo. But that's a painting for another day.

I have some photos, should I paint it?

Break Time (Mildred and Ethel)

The long hard winter is over. Spring is here, bugs are out, snakes are getting run over in traffic. My favorite time of year! Here are a couple cows taking a break, enjoying the weather, chewing some cud.

A tree is a tree

One of the side effects of drawing and painting for many years is, you end up with a lot of drawings and paintings. The picture below started with two tree drawings I did in a sketchbook. They weren't based on any trees in particular. Just ones I made up. I scanned them and then added color, texture and type in Adobe Illustrator. I first started this two or three years ago and forgot about it. Better late than never?

Hoping for Spring

With all the stinking snow around here, it was time to start thinking about something else. So I dug out an old drawing and give it some color and grainy texture via Adobe Illustrator. It's one of my favorite programs, and the first one I really got to know in the stone ages of computerized illustration.

Textures and Colors

Near Rome Pennsylvania I've been able to collect lots of material for paintings. Along the stretch of road that my sister-in-law lives on are lots of old farm buildings and worn trees. This painting was of a corner of an old barn. I had a lot of fun with the light coming through the dark doorway from the opposite wall. Not to mention the subtle color changes in the weathered planks.

Wanted, a tree with lots of branches lopped off

Northern Pennsylvania again. Up a winding road in the middle of nowhere I found this lovely old tree. It is quite battle scarred, but still standing strong, wearing it's sign proudly. I don't remember what was on the sign. Probably no hunting or something. I made it a wanted sign. Fugitives must have been on my mind.

This was done as a class demonstration. Quickly with glazes and dry brushing.

More rooftops

I think this was from somewhere in Ellicott City, Maryland. It's very hilly there. I like the way the houses rise up the hillside.