Happy day
Deposit made. I'm killing time till I know for a certainty that my funds will be available, before I go to PayPal and make a $120 payment to John Houle for The Kill and Archaeopteryx.
The Kill is a large refined realist graphite drawing of a male Smilodon fatalis sitting up proudly, his scruffy little mane fluffed by the wind, next to the enormous dead bison he's just killed. He's looking off in the distance as if he's making eye contact with his pride, mates and siblings, mother or best friend. I have noticed among cats that not only do brothers sometimes band together, but unrelated male cats will hit it off and develop a deep male bonding, treating that other male not as a rival but a brother. The adopted brother's cubs don't get threatened any more than his own, they tag-team to get the attention of females, they may or may not have a gay relationship. I don't know about lions or Smilodons but I know that in house cats this is common, and Smilodon was a social cat.
Archaeopteryx is the oldest true bird ever discovered, or held that title for a long time. It's a beautiful bird, with a dinosaurian face. John painted it in oil, and reworked it several times before he was satisfied. I was nervous the last time he reworked it, but when I saw the results, I loved it. I have happy memories of finding Archaeopteryx in books as a kid, of seeing the Archaeopteryx diorama in the Field Museum in Chicago, of that creature being one of my favorites along with the trilobite, the giant tentacled orthocones, all theropod dinosaurs and Stegosaurus. John has captured it with a realism and quality that makes this painting museumworthy, and I feel privileged to have both of these pieces in my home as a private individual -- when both are so brilliant that they should actually be in a natural history museum or art museum.
Well, I get to keep them while I'm alive and maybe I'll will them to a natural history museum or an art museum. Lawrence has more than one good art museum. I may also, if I ever get rich, purchase them one of John's giant paintings, the ones way too big for any house I could actually live in. Just to point out to the public that Contemporary Art includes brilliant realism as well as last century's abstractions and pursuit of ugliness.
I've also managed because I put more payments into Houly's bill last month, to squeeze out a Blick order for this month. I am waiting to go through the checkout on that, after happily spending weeks and days organizing this order.
Many thanks to eternalism for a comments thread that has turned out to be more useful as a self-help tool and personal growth ramble than the entirety of The Artist's Way. I realized last night as I was reading and answering those comments, that I've been doing the thorough self examination that I was trying to do with TAW in that comments thread! Just sharing it, and reading hers, and easing my soul with a gentle rebalancing back to my own real beliefs and good attitudes while upchucking the bad attitudes embedded in TAW.
(Detailed negative and positive review analysis of The Artist's Way is under the cut, with some other things including a ramble on my Blick order to kill time before I can go through checkout. Like most negative reviews, any good ones at least, my critique may show that it's right for a reader in ways it wasn't for me. I make no bones about personal taste or differences.)
We came to the conclusion a couple of posts ago that The Artist's Way, like many self help books, has a blaming tone and sets up overwhelming levels of activity. The result is that some people center their lives around the program and do succeed, filling the cultural gap my son in law, HeraldoftheAbyss, described as why people seek Revival Movements. Revival Movements involve more than defining your beliefs and what to wear and who's Us and who's Them to create a cultural identity. They also fill their members' social lives completely. They are immersive. The Sunday afternoon Church Social and every baby shower or picnic or choir meeting is as important as the actual church service. The weekend Goddess camping trip is socially obligatory and so are the environmentally happy recycling crafts at the crafts fair and other pagan activities. They fill the gaps that tribal cultures fill by defining not only status but activity, immersively.
You can only get that from actually believing in it completely and putting it first in your life over everything else, the workshops and seminars and networking are part of the total experience and it is why everything from movements I see as good and wonderful to scary cults draw in members. It provides cultural consistency. I am foreign to its culture and highly critical of several aspects, notably the blaming. The problem is being injected along with the solution. I've had to rip new discouragements out of my head that came in almost every chapter, and I've become madder at it the more it's wearing off as I look at the results. I was less creative and more ashamed of myself every week. It flared up the shame over my disabilities with its tone, a reprise of all the times people didn't believe my disabilities were real and shamed me for not being able to keep up with normal activities.
It implied strongly and perhaps accurately that I wouldn't get any help from it unless I did turn Christian or vaguely general-monotheist with their specific dogma, which is middling on the dogma scale. Not super conservative or super liberal, mostly just the big thing of Divine Will, which sits next to Divine Right of Kings in my book and is the basis for it. It also implied that if I couldn't take long brisk walks, take up an exercise program and some sports, go briskly clothes and shoe shopping on a budget I don't want to waste on those trifles and cheerily clean my house stem to stern at the same time, I would not be able to open up to my creativity.
Which is a crock. The only truth the crock is that my not being able to do most of those things at all, let alone all of them at once, let alone also have any time and energy for creative work, keeps me from joining and participating in the subculture and its scheduled creative activities. I even wound up ashamed of being unable to create a collage as a self portrait -- when a collage rests on other people's images and no one in a magazine remotely looks like me.
But it's much easier to resist negative social pressure in a crowd that's resisting the same negative social pressure. The success of the growing TAW community is its numbers and infrastructure as a Revival Movement. It may be extremely empowering to vaguely Christian joggers and self-help addicts, for some people it will prove to be an exact fit -- and solve more problems than just opening up creativity. Because a Revival Movement does serve that function. It lets people turn off the television and go flock together with folks of their own ilk, have a human-sized tribe-sized culture to belong to, and "Us and Them" does not always mean "Kill them, kill them all." Sometimes it just means "Go away and leave us to do our own thing."
If you don't have a philosophical problem with Divine Will and do want to keep a strong connection with the mainstream, if you're a moderate health nut and want to be more creative, this overwhelming program will put creativity into a category with the jogging and the smoothies and the healthful activities and get your house clean and all the rest, with group support. As a lifestyle it may not suck if you get into that. It will not root out mainstream assumptions at their core, but it does present a workable compromise with them. The pressures can be turned to your advantage -- and the program structures a gradual shift in dress and public behavior that will inform every other normative person around you that you are still a good person and a respectable member of a creative profession. Weird but safe, kooky rather than scary, appealing and worthy of patronage. If you want to follow a creative profession in a socially acceptable way, the program is gold because its behavioral demands fit the daily script of the mainstream and define a subset of it that is socially acceptable.
This may matter a lot to people who have more ties than I do. The TAW program may ease the shock to families of creative people who think their son or daughter went off their nut with this painting thing or scriptwriting thing. They can still say that, but affectionately, and see that success hasn't spoiled them. It's a script. It may be a better script for a lot of people than the one they were born into.
I don't do scripts so it sucked for me. But it can if it becomes the center of someone's life, swing all that social support around till the creative profession is taken for granted as fact, as who they are in the community.
Why I don't hate it for anyone: this subculture is harmless and not screaming for my blood. Nothing in it calls for atrocity. There are no 400 Club cries to kill all the witches and queers. My way is better for me -- but there are a lot of people out there who will find the TAW Revival Movement solves a problem that wasn't even mentioned. The problem that America is a superstate rather than a culture and that ethnic cultures get broken up and destroyed in it, that family cultures degrade until the toughest most lasting elements are only the abuse cycles, and that liberal religions like Unitarianism rarely provide the immersive culture that the conservative Revival Movements do. They do not require you to show up on Sunday and sit in a hard pew and either shout and sing or sit still and listen. They do not require you to show up to the barbecue and the charity fundraiser and the crafts show and the rest of it.
I may need a ludicrous amount of personal freedom in my life but I'm a rarity. Most people are happier with a society that they fit into where a good deal of their time and energy go into community activity that reinforces social identity. Unitarianism in New Orleans flourished because that particular First Unitarian Church was on a holy roll of activism, and there were enough protests and charities and fundraisers and activities that if you had an average income and level of free time and immersive commitment, you could easily center your social life on it and not have to rub elbows with people you can't stand or try to fill an empty Saturday afternoon by yourself.
There is real value in Revival Movements to close the culture gap. Any Revival Movement that involves painting, drawing, singing, scriptwriting and making up stories beats all, compared to those that involve hunting down and beating up the Others. Leaving out the Others to ignore them while they do their own thing is the ethical thing to do when fulfilling that human instinct to define Us and Them. TAW does not treat the Other as Prey, so we're all good here, I'm just not part of it.
This also makes the fifth week exercise of Reading Deprivation essential. That is the initiatic obedience test of commitment to the path and the community, a gateway between people who are trying it to see if it fits, and the people who belong in it. Many people try it more than once. If you are genuinely interested in joining it, which is pretty lifelong because propagating it with connections and activities maintains it, then go ahead and do Reading Deprivation for an entire week, stick to it, be strict and be proud of doing so. You're earning entry into a subculture of non-assholes who are spending all their group energy on making art, there are far worse things to do with a life!
It's just not the only path to opening up creativity and I'll be writing my own. Which may or may not be as big of a hit because I'm not sure mine will generate a Revival Movement so much as a bunch of individuals finding their own way in life. I may have to do a chapter on Revival Movements themselves though, and on how to choose one for the best personal fit if you decide you'd rather live in one than roam the mainstream culture at large.
Again, great thanks to Eternalism for helping me come to this conclusion and achieve closure on the last twelve weeks. They're not wasted time. I visited TAW and found out I didn't fit it, but it is in itself a healthy thing for those who do fit it. It will take a lot of work to get in. Presumably for those who do all that, it pays off by being a Revival Movement and gives a community that's a happier way of life than the mainstream. It also isn't a ripoff cult like the Moonies, which reaches to the same human need and rapaciously sucks all economic and personal resources, so it's healthy in the way that Revival Movements like the SCA or Civil War Recreation or Modern Paganism are.
Back to my drooling over my happy day of ordering my Blickness.
Okay, here's me indulging myself again. lol
I'm happy about it and not getting art supplies in June, so I had to rework the order completely. June is budgeted for getting myself a good webhost, one with easy to use dummy software that nongeek writers like yours truly, who have a good eye for design and a bad memory for coding, can create a good site with. June begins the hub site -- and I'll have some ads on it to support it, because this is costing me $299 a year to do it this way. It also means I don't have to pester Kitten to set aside her paying work to create my site on Dreamweaver. Instead, she'll be editing my copy, especially my permanent copy, and critiquing as I do it for myself. I'll have links to things like all my eHow articles in an easily accessed list, links to my DeviantArt, links to my LJ which I'm not neglecting for Newest Blog, but Newest Blog will have shorter, more topical articles.
The sorts of things that I put up when I expect to get paid for them, vs. the community blather I do here, where you have to put up with 7,000 word bad days roaming twenty topics to get to the fun stuff and the topics you enjoy reading.
Given that, I did not want to wait till July to start plein air oil painting! Some of the things I'm getting will be just as useful for Plein Air Pastel, Plein Air Watercolor, Plein Air Sketching, where I already have all the supplies for the medium but need to be able to take them into the yard, and if this summer goes really well, into the park.
Thanks to a Blick coupon, I managed to get all the colors I really wanted and some extras. I got the giant tube of Titanium White that'll make large paintings possible in along with Sap Green and Alizarin Crimson as necessities not currently in my palette. I've also managed to put in all the essential colors Edward Aldrich listed in Drawing and Painting Animals, plus have warm and cold primaries and warm and cold secondaries. Having a full spectrum of brights in the secondaries as well is essential for a floral palette. That is why I needed those. It's also in itself a complete palette, since mixed neutrals are lively and appealing. So I now have two major palettes, both generous.
The result is not just that I can paint outdoors, but that I can paint anything I want and adjust my palette to the subject and style I'm exploring. Edward Aldrich's palette is focused primarily on painting animals, secondarily on landscapes. Green pigments are essential for landscapes, but you can do less green oriented backgrounds in some animal painting. John Houle, my idol and the professional artist that I'm collecting, actually uses Payne's Grey as his favorite sky color. Aldrich uses Cobalt Blue or Ultramarine, with Cerulean Blue on his secondary palette. I have about half of his "useful but not essential" colors, and will be expanding into that sometime around fall experimenting with the Cadmiums and some greens that aren't as vivid as the ones I put in this batch.
He considered Pthalo Green, Permanent Green (for which I substituted Pthalo Green Yellow Shade by eyeballing the hue), Viridian (Very bluish) and Sap Green the "good colors to have" and emphasized that the greens are important for landscapes because they're brighter than mixed greens. Too true. I didn't get the Viridian, chose the brighter Pthalo Green because that was in my initial set of Griffin Alkyds, but would've bought it anyway as the most vivid green for mixing. It was top of my landscape list. So is Sap Green. Those are my Warm and Cold greens, with two choices of Warm (yellowish) greens because I do landscapes a lot and they mix differently.
Cerulean blue, Raw Umber, Cadmium yellows through reds other than Orange, which is on this order, and Viridian are on his "Colors good to have" that I don't have yet.
Instead for floral reasons I got Indian Yellow -- a blazing warm yellow-orange about comparable to Cadmium Yellow Deep, Scarlet Lake, a definitely orangy red or very red-orange color, and Cadmium Orange. Those three with Winsor Lemon and Winsor Yellow should give me a great range of yellow through red brights, going down to Alizarin Crimson and Permanent Rose. I put in Magenta, which is darker and more purplish than the Prismacolor and actually a perfect hue right between Permanent Rose and Dioxazine Purple.
Raw Umber will get on my list. I actually have it in watercolor, but the color swatch in Alkyds looked very grayed, I may not be using it as often as raw sienna mixed with a dash of Paynes to cool it. But there are earth tones Aldrich hasn't got listed that I may try later on in various nature and animal paintings, colors down below the tertiary list into quaternary and "a treat to find out what a new color does" that I can put in as stuffers when I do orders that center on a giant colored pencils set.
I just realized that with summer ahead and bright flowers for outdoor things to paint, while winter here is all browns and golds, that seasonally I am not going to need Raw Umber till fall or winter. But I will need Magenta and Indian Yellow and all that right now to do the orange lilies, the magenta flowers, the scarlet runner beans, from life.
KKitten42 is getting a nice red pen for critiquing my manuscripts and website copy. Sascha is getting an eight color set of Morocolor opaque watercolors, kid brush included, just the kind she liked with the Yarka set of transparent ones, and a set of 12 Crayolas because she keeps bringing me one-inch pencil stubs to sharpen. HeraldoftheAbyss is getting two wirebound hardback ProArt sketchbooks and paying for those as well as putting a few bucks into shipping, which helped me squish in one more color on the order.
Along with all the paints, I put in a Princeton Value Pack of assorted bristle flats and brights. I want to try bristle brushes for some bristle-brush techniques in the Aldrich book, and that'll guarantee that I do not mistake them for acrylic painting brushes and try to use them and wreck an acrylic painting. I like synthetics for acrylic. I may use some of the synthetics for oils, but when I do, I'll splash paint on the handle to make sure I know these are now oily and spoiled for water mediums. They were cheap. I may pick up another pack later on if I like them, there were two packs that looked handy. Or just pay a little more and choose specific sizes and shapes based on what I need later on, but I need to find out first!
I've also got a 2 1/2lb metal field easel with shoulderstrap and carrycase, and a Clearance sale Artist's Umbrella that either clips to it or can be staked into the ground and also has a nylon carrycase.
I cut a long ramble on art chairs, because it came back to the same conclusion I've come to in buying the Alvin Heritage easel. French Easels are resonant and glamorous and practical for people who can carry 40lb backpacks, ie, abled people. They are out of reach physically for me, even the half width one that looks so skimpy. All I actually need with this setup is a cheap lawn chair and maybe a tacklebox with a handle, or to rearrange a messenger bag with my oil painting stuff instead of using it to store drawing pads. Keeping it empty and packing it before trips seems like a good way to handle outdoor art.
Wow. I have cash in my wallet too. I could go to a dollar store, get my summer flip-flops for a buck, and pick up a lawn chair there too. I'll be good to go. I need the flipflops too, if I'm going to just get up and do this on impulse anytime it's sunny and nice and I feel up to it! Shave off the energy to find shoes and socks and put them on.
The Kill is a large refined realist graphite drawing of a male Smilodon fatalis sitting up proudly, his scruffy little mane fluffed by the wind, next to the enormous dead bison he's just killed. He's looking off in the distance as if he's making eye contact with his pride, mates and siblings, mother or best friend. I have noticed among cats that not only do brothers sometimes band together, but unrelated male cats will hit it off and develop a deep male bonding, treating that other male not as a rival but a brother. The adopted brother's cubs don't get threatened any more than his own, they tag-team to get the attention of females, they may or may not have a gay relationship. I don't know about lions or Smilodons but I know that in house cats this is common, and Smilodon was a social cat.
Archaeopteryx is the oldest true bird ever discovered, or held that title for a long time. It's a beautiful bird, with a dinosaurian face. John painted it in oil, and reworked it several times before he was satisfied. I was nervous the last time he reworked it, but when I saw the results, I loved it. I have happy memories of finding Archaeopteryx in books as a kid, of seeing the Archaeopteryx diorama in the Field Museum in Chicago, of that creature being one of my favorites along with the trilobite, the giant tentacled orthocones, all theropod dinosaurs and Stegosaurus. John has captured it with a realism and quality that makes this painting museumworthy, and I feel privileged to have both of these pieces in my home as a private individual -- when both are so brilliant that they should actually be in a natural history museum or art museum.
Well, I get to keep them while I'm alive and maybe I'll will them to a natural history museum or an art museum. Lawrence has more than one good art museum. I may also, if I ever get rich, purchase them one of John's giant paintings, the ones way too big for any house I could actually live in. Just to point out to the public that Contemporary Art includes brilliant realism as well as last century's abstractions and pursuit of ugliness.
I've also managed because I put more payments into Houly's bill last month, to squeeze out a Blick order for this month. I am waiting to go through the checkout on that, after happily spending weeks and days organizing this order.
Many thanks to eternalism for a comments thread that has turned out to be more useful as a self-help tool and personal growth ramble than the entirety of The Artist's Way. I realized last night as I was reading and answering those comments, that I've been doing the thorough self examination that I was trying to do with TAW in that comments thread! Just sharing it, and reading hers, and easing my soul with a gentle rebalancing back to my own real beliefs and good attitudes while upchucking the bad attitudes embedded in TAW.
(Detailed negative and positive review analysis of The Artist's Way is under the cut, with some other things including a ramble on my Blick order to kill time before I can go through checkout. Like most negative reviews, any good ones at least, my critique may show that it's right for a reader in ways it wasn't for me. I make no bones about personal taste or differences.)
We came to the conclusion a couple of posts ago that The Artist's Way, like many self help books, has a blaming tone and sets up overwhelming levels of activity. The result is that some people center their lives around the program and do succeed, filling the cultural gap my son in law, HeraldoftheAbyss, described as why people seek Revival Movements. Revival Movements involve more than defining your beliefs and what to wear and who's Us and who's Them to create a cultural identity. They also fill their members' social lives completely. They are immersive. The Sunday afternoon Church Social and every baby shower or picnic or choir meeting is as important as the actual church service. The weekend Goddess camping trip is socially obligatory and so are the environmentally happy recycling crafts at the crafts fair and other pagan activities. They fill the gaps that tribal cultures fill by defining not only status but activity, immersively.
You can only get that from actually believing in it completely and putting it first in your life over everything else, the workshops and seminars and networking are part of the total experience and it is why everything from movements I see as good and wonderful to scary cults draw in members. It provides cultural consistency. I am foreign to its culture and highly critical of several aspects, notably the blaming. The problem is being injected along with the solution. I've had to rip new discouragements out of my head that came in almost every chapter, and I've become madder at it the more it's wearing off as I look at the results. I was less creative and more ashamed of myself every week. It flared up the shame over my disabilities with its tone, a reprise of all the times people didn't believe my disabilities were real and shamed me for not being able to keep up with normal activities.
It implied strongly and perhaps accurately that I wouldn't get any help from it unless I did turn Christian or vaguely general-monotheist with their specific dogma, which is middling on the dogma scale. Not super conservative or super liberal, mostly just the big thing of Divine Will, which sits next to Divine Right of Kings in my book and is the basis for it. It also implied that if I couldn't take long brisk walks, take up an exercise program and some sports, go briskly clothes and shoe shopping on a budget I don't want to waste on those trifles and cheerily clean my house stem to stern at the same time, I would not be able to open up to my creativity.
Which is a crock. The only truth the crock is that my not being able to do most of those things at all, let alone all of them at once, let alone also have any time and energy for creative work, keeps me from joining and participating in the subculture and its scheduled creative activities. I even wound up ashamed of being unable to create a collage as a self portrait -- when a collage rests on other people's images and no one in a magazine remotely looks like me.
But it's much easier to resist negative social pressure in a crowd that's resisting the same negative social pressure. The success of the growing TAW community is its numbers and infrastructure as a Revival Movement. It may be extremely empowering to vaguely Christian joggers and self-help addicts, for some people it will prove to be an exact fit -- and solve more problems than just opening up creativity. Because a Revival Movement does serve that function. It lets people turn off the television and go flock together with folks of their own ilk, have a human-sized tribe-sized culture to belong to, and "Us and Them" does not always mean "Kill them, kill them all." Sometimes it just means "Go away and leave us to do our own thing."
If you don't have a philosophical problem with Divine Will and do want to keep a strong connection with the mainstream, if you're a moderate health nut and want to be more creative, this overwhelming program will put creativity into a category with the jogging and the smoothies and the healthful activities and get your house clean and all the rest, with group support. As a lifestyle it may not suck if you get into that. It will not root out mainstream assumptions at their core, but it does present a workable compromise with them. The pressures can be turned to your advantage -- and the program structures a gradual shift in dress and public behavior that will inform every other normative person around you that you are still a good person and a respectable member of a creative profession. Weird but safe, kooky rather than scary, appealing and worthy of patronage. If you want to follow a creative profession in a socially acceptable way, the program is gold because its behavioral demands fit the daily script of the mainstream and define a subset of it that is socially acceptable.
This may matter a lot to people who have more ties than I do. The TAW program may ease the shock to families of creative people who think their son or daughter went off their nut with this painting thing or scriptwriting thing. They can still say that, but affectionately, and see that success hasn't spoiled them. It's a script. It may be a better script for a lot of people than the one they were born into.
I don't do scripts so it sucked for me. But it can if it becomes the center of someone's life, swing all that social support around till the creative profession is taken for granted as fact, as who they are in the community.
Why I don't hate it for anyone: this subculture is harmless and not screaming for my blood. Nothing in it calls for atrocity. There are no 400 Club cries to kill all the witches and queers. My way is better for me -- but there are a lot of people out there who will find the TAW Revival Movement solves a problem that wasn't even mentioned. The problem that America is a superstate rather than a culture and that ethnic cultures get broken up and destroyed in it, that family cultures degrade until the toughest most lasting elements are only the abuse cycles, and that liberal religions like Unitarianism rarely provide the immersive culture that the conservative Revival Movements do. They do not require you to show up on Sunday and sit in a hard pew and either shout and sing or sit still and listen. They do not require you to show up to the barbecue and the charity fundraiser and the crafts show and the rest of it.
I may need a ludicrous amount of personal freedom in my life but I'm a rarity. Most people are happier with a society that they fit into where a good deal of their time and energy go into community activity that reinforces social identity. Unitarianism in New Orleans flourished because that particular First Unitarian Church was on a holy roll of activism, and there were enough protests and charities and fundraisers and activities that if you had an average income and level of free time and immersive commitment, you could easily center your social life on it and not have to rub elbows with people you can't stand or try to fill an empty Saturday afternoon by yourself.
There is real value in Revival Movements to close the culture gap. Any Revival Movement that involves painting, drawing, singing, scriptwriting and making up stories beats all, compared to those that involve hunting down and beating up the Others. Leaving out the Others to ignore them while they do their own thing is the ethical thing to do when fulfilling that human instinct to define Us and Them. TAW does not treat the Other as Prey, so we're all good here, I'm just not part of it.
This also makes the fifth week exercise of Reading Deprivation essential. That is the initiatic obedience test of commitment to the path and the community, a gateway between people who are trying it to see if it fits, and the people who belong in it. Many people try it more than once. If you are genuinely interested in joining it, which is pretty lifelong because propagating it with connections and activities maintains it, then go ahead and do Reading Deprivation for an entire week, stick to it, be strict and be proud of doing so. You're earning entry into a subculture of non-assholes who are spending all their group energy on making art, there are far worse things to do with a life!
It's just not the only path to opening up creativity and I'll be writing my own. Which may or may not be as big of a hit because I'm not sure mine will generate a Revival Movement so much as a bunch of individuals finding their own way in life. I may have to do a chapter on Revival Movements themselves though, and on how to choose one for the best personal fit if you decide you'd rather live in one than roam the mainstream culture at large.
Again, great thanks to Eternalism for helping me come to this conclusion and achieve closure on the last twelve weeks. They're not wasted time. I visited TAW and found out I didn't fit it, but it is in itself a healthy thing for those who do fit it. It will take a lot of work to get in. Presumably for those who do all that, it pays off by being a Revival Movement and gives a community that's a happier way of life than the mainstream. It also isn't a ripoff cult like the Moonies, which reaches to the same human need and rapaciously sucks all economic and personal resources, so it's healthy in the way that Revival Movements like the SCA or Civil War Recreation or Modern Paganism are.
Back to my drooling over my happy day of ordering my Blickness.
Okay, here's me indulging myself again. lol
I'm happy about it and not getting art supplies in June, so I had to rework the order completely. June is budgeted for getting myself a good webhost, one with easy to use dummy software that nongeek writers like yours truly, who have a good eye for design and a bad memory for coding, can create a good site with. June begins the hub site -- and I'll have some ads on it to support it, because this is costing me $299 a year to do it this way. It also means I don't have to pester Kitten to set aside her paying work to create my site on Dreamweaver. Instead, she'll be editing my copy, especially my permanent copy, and critiquing as I do it for myself. I'll have links to things like all my eHow articles in an easily accessed list, links to my DeviantArt, links to my LJ which I'm not neglecting for Newest Blog, but Newest Blog will have shorter, more topical articles.
The sorts of things that I put up when I expect to get paid for them, vs. the community blather I do here, where you have to put up with 7,000 word bad days roaming twenty topics to get to the fun stuff and the topics you enjoy reading.
Given that, I did not want to wait till July to start plein air oil painting! Some of the things I'm getting will be just as useful for Plein Air Pastel, Plein Air Watercolor, Plein Air Sketching, where I already have all the supplies for the medium but need to be able to take them into the yard, and if this summer goes really well, into the park.
Thanks to a Blick coupon, I managed to get all the colors I really wanted and some extras. I got the giant tube of Titanium White that'll make large paintings possible in along with Sap Green and Alizarin Crimson as necessities not currently in my palette. I've also managed to put in all the essential colors Edward Aldrich listed in Drawing and Painting Animals, plus have warm and cold primaries and warm and cold secondaries. Having a full spectrum of brights in the secondaries as well is essential for a floral palette. That is why I needed those. It's also in itself a complete palette, since mixed neutrals are lively and appealing. So I now have two major palettes, both generous.
The result is not just that I can paint outdoors, but that I can paint anything I want and adjust my palette to the subject and style I'm exploring. Edward Aldrich's palette is focused primarily on painting animals, secondarily on landscapes. Green pigments are essential for landscapes, but you can do less green oriented backgrounds in some animal painting. John Houle, my idol and the professional artist that I'm collecting, actually uses Payne's Grey as his favorite sky color. Aldrich uses Cobalt Blue or Ultramarine, with Cerulean Blue on his secondary palette. I have about half of his "useful but not essential" colors, and will be expanding into that sometime around fall experimenting with the Cadmiums and some greens that aren't as vivid as the ones I put in this batch.
He considered Pthalo Green, Permanent Green (for which I substituted Pthalo Green Yellow Shade by eyeballing the hue), Viridian (Very bluish) and Sap Green the "good colors to have" and emphasized that the greens are important for landscapes because they're brighter than mixed greens. Too true. I didn't get the Viridian, chose the brighter Pthalo Green because that was in my initial set of Griffin Alkyds, but would've bought it anyway as the most vivid green for mixing. It was top of my landscape list. So is Sap Green. Those are my Warm and Cold greens, with two choices of Warm (yellowish) greens because I do landscapes a lot and they mix differently.
Cerulean blue, Raw Umber, Cadmium yellows through reds other than Orange, which is on this order, and Viridian are on his "Colors good to have" that I don't have yet.
Instead for floral reasons I got Indian Yellow -- a blazing warm yellow-orange about comparable to Cadmium Yellow Deep, Scarlet Lake, a definitely orangy red or very red-orange color, and Cadmium Orange. Those three with Winsor Lemon and Winsor Yellow should give me a great range of yellow through red brights, going down to Alizarin Crimson and Permanent Rose. I put in Magenta, which is darker and more purplish than the Prismacolor and actually a perfect hue right between Permanent Rose and Dioxazine Purple.
Raw Umber will get on my list. I actually have it in watercolor, but the color swatch in Alkyds looked very grayed, I may not be using it as often as raw sienna mixed with a dash of Paynes to cool it. But there are earth tones Aldrich hasn't got listed that I may try later on in various nature and animal paintings, colors down below the tertiary list into quaternary and "a treat to find out what a new color does" that I can put in as stuffers when I do orders that center on a giant colored pencils set.
I just realized that with summer ahead and bright flowers for outdoor things to paint, while winter here is all browns and golds, that seasonally I am not going to need Raw Umber till fall or winter. But I will need Magenta and Indian Yellow and all that right now to do the orange lilies, the magenta flowers, the scarlet runner beans, from life.
KKitten42 is getting a nice red pen for critiquing my manuscripts and website copy. Sascha is getting an eight color set of Morocolor opaque watercolors, kid brush included, just the kind she liked with the Yarka set of transparent ones, and a set of 12 Crayolas because she keeps bringing me one-inch pencil stubs to sharpen. HeraldoftheAbyss is getting two wirebound hardback ProArt sketchbooks and paying for those as well as putting a few bucks into shipping, which helped me squish in one more color on the order.
Along with all the paints, I put in a Princeton Value Pack of assorted bristle flats and brights. I want to try bristle brushes for some bristle-brush techniques in the Aldrich book, and that'll guarantee that I do not mistake them for acrylic painting brushes and try to use them and wreck an acrylic painting. I like synthetics for acrylic. I may use some of the synthetics for oils, but when I do, I'll splash paint on the handle to make sure I know these are now oily and spoiled for water mediums. They were cheap. I may pick up another pack later on if I like them, there were two packs that looked handy. Or just pay a little more and choose specific sizes and shapes based on what I need later on, but I need to find out first!
I've also got a 2 1/2lb metal field easel with shoulderstrap and carrycase, and a Clearance sale Artist's Umbrella that either clips to it or can be staked into the ground and also has a nylon carrycase.
I cut a long ramble on art chairs, because it came back to the same conclusion I've come to in buying the Alvin Heritage easel. French Easels are resonant and glamorous and practical for people who can carry 40lb backpacks, ie, abled people. They are out of reach physically for me, even the half width one that looks so skimpy. All I actually need with this setup is a cheap lawn chair and maybe a tacklebox with a handle, or to rearrange a messenger bag with my oil painting stuff instead of using it to store drawing pads. Keeping it empty and packing it before trips seems like a good way to handle outdoor art.
Wow. I have cash in my wallet too. I could go to a dollar store, get my summer flip-flops for a buck, and pick up a lawn chair there too. I'll be good to go. I need the flipflops too, if I'm going to just get up and do this on impulse anytime it's sunny and nice and I feel up to it! Shave off the energy to find shoes and socks and put them on.