Sisters - second charity Art Heart

Things are progressing with my work for Olivia's Heart Fund, a charity working to fight CHD (congenital heart defect). Pixel-Artistry has been redesigning the OHF website, and it has recently gone live! I know we will be making a few more tweaks, but the bulk of the work is done, and that frees me up to put more time into the Heart Art project.

As CHD awareness week lands in February of each year, the gallery event we are planning to show the series of   hearts will be in February of 2011. Now my original plan was to render 20 hearts - each for a person or family who has suffered with CHD. It is possible to hold the event with fewer hearts, but that is my goal. OHF  has been locating families who are willing to participate, and their stories are slowly coming in. To stay on schedule, I'll have to complete a heart each  2-3 weeks. As I'm working on the artwork, I remind myself that making the paintings too complex will slow my progress, and potentially paralyze me in the creative process. So it's important to balance narrative and simplicity.

original version - Sisters  10" x 10" mixed-media

The second heart depicts the story of sisters diagnosed with truncus arteriosus. 


For this painting, I wanted to depict the sisters, as well as the branching of the heart indicating truncus. With some internet research, I found a few medical illustrations of hearts with truncus, and began thinking about the branching and life - somewhat of a tree of life emanating from the heart. I sketched out the concept in Adobe Photoshop, settling on sisters holding hands, facing this tree, which represents both the defect and the life they are living beyond it.

The printed sketch

I printed the digital sketch, and transferred it to watercolor paper, where I began an underpainting. This helps when I am filling in with pastel later, so that the paper has more tooth, and the color has a lot of impact when it's blended in. It's also helpful to me in that I can brush out the background quickly without worrying too much about it looking perfect at first. As I worked on the underpainting, I made some changes from the original sketch. The heart in the background was just too literal, so I left the truncus branching, and let the heart become a full tree.

Detail of the branches in pastel

With that resolved, I started filling in the heart center with pastel. the linework in this design was delicate, so I used pastel pencils quite a bit. I felt the tree should have more life and more color as well, so I added leaves to the branches. Because the hearts of both girls are linked by this form of CHD, I added gold-leaf hearts to each of their silhouettes.

Detail of the gold leaf hearts

The last element was to complete the outside edge around the heart. I've been trying to create a vibrant, radiant effect for this portion of the paintings. This was completed with layers of soft pastel, transitioning through several colors. I really like the way this painting worked, and so I feel it is complete. It tells enough of the story to invite the viewer in, and perhaps ask for more.

Layering of pastel for the outside edge

You can read more about the OHF Heart Art here, and you can support the charity here.

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UPDATE!!

As referenced here, I decided to make a change to this piece. 


At the time I created this heart, I was torn on whether to include symbolism for a third child who was not afflicted with CHD. As the painting was detailed already, I opted to focus on the two CHD sisters. But after some thought, I decided to incorporate symbolism for the third sibling. 

updated art - Sisters, 10" x 10" mixed-media  

As I pictured her looking out for her sisters, I thought perhaps she should be there, looking over them from the background. I envisioned her as a brilliant bird nested in the tree, watching over the girls.

detail of the nesting bird

Luckily I was able to add this symbolism as another layer over the branches using pastel pencils. The paper still had enough tooth to accept more detail, and I think the bird is just conspicuous enough without overpowering the design.

Focus

Wow! It's been a while since I blogged. My intention was to be posting at least every week, with some new artwork. But things have gotten busy on the digital side of my business, and so my focus shifted away from the  blog for a while.While I am grateful for the opportunities to bring in some regular business, I do not want to lose sight of my artistic goals. It's important to me that I balance the digital work with painting and creative pursuits.

So the further I get from creating my own artwork, the further I am from happiness. At least I have been able to create a few new pieces during my blogging hiatus. Since I am so far behind on posting the art, I'll try to catch up from where I left off a while back.

My husband and I were visiting with family in Attleboro, and we took a walk downtown to check out the Attleboro Arts Museum. Lucky me! Not only was the gallery there open, but they were having the opening reception for their Celebrating Diversity show (sweet!). I got a chance to check out some very inspiring artwork, see the museum space, and pick up information about their upcoming events. By the way - there was some fascinating work at the diversity show, and one of the first displays there was a series of small sculptures - Army of the Imperfectly Dressed by CA Stigliano, who was my wood carving teacher at MassArt! Something about art and my MassArt connections coming around again makes me feel like I'm on the right track.

After the show I became a member of the museum, and created two mixed-media pieces to submit for the 2010 Spring Flower show at the end of March. ...and WOOT! Both pieces were accepted! Since the theme of the art show was Light and Dark: a Celebration of Contrast, I worked from some of my flower photos that had heavy contrast and I hoped would make decent compositions.

Queen Anne's Lace  8" x 10" pastel

This first painting is soft pastels on black paper. Of the two, it was my husband's favorite. Someone at the show liked it as well, as it sold during the exhibition!

Sunset Blooms  10" x 8" mixed-media

This second painting is mixed-media - I started with a loose acrylic underpainting on a watercolor block, and then layered soft pastel over it. I really love the color of the flowers, and thought the deep blue would make a nice contrast. This piece was selected for a merit award by the judges (WOOT x 2!). So I have to say, I'm very happy with how things went at this show. The painted work by all of the artists was fantastic, and the show also included floral and landscape designs from several local businesses, each inspired by classic pieces of art. There were some really creative interpretations of the theme.

I have some more new work to post, so I'll be back on the blog (tomorrow, hopefully) to continue with the catch-up session. Some personal pieces, as well as more work on the Heart Art for the charity show coming up in 2011.

Revisiting portraiture

Now that I have some more time to devote to pastel work, I've been able to create some portraits of my own family and pets. The first is of one of our Australian shepherds, who is a beautiful  black tri-color. The other portrait is of my husband Brian from a trip we took to Martha's Vineyard last spring. Both are soft pastel on toned paper. Enjoy!

Marley  12" x 16" pastel

Brian  9" x 12" pastel

Artwork up for sale through my website!

It's taken me a while to get the the site updated, but there are now two categories of my artwork with paintings for sale on my website! These two categories - landscapes and still-lifes have the most paintings in my current inventory, but I will be adding other work soon.

I will also be adding examples of portraits and pet portraits, which can be commissioned and painted from a photo. I have some photos of my dogs here at home that I've been itching to paint.

Please check out the new artwork! Everybody should have something beautiful in their life.

 

 

 

 

 

Tool for donating for emergency relief - Charity Navigator

After the terrible earthquake that rocked Haiti, my husband and I wanted to make a donation to help those in need. While I am not a superstar donor, I have tried over the last few years to give in some form several times a year. I've been donating blood for the last couple of years, and now that I can make my own work hours I have done three donations in a row as soon as I was eligible (just about every two months) through the American Red Cross. I try to go through my closet regularly and pare down usable items I no longer need to give to the Salvation Army. At my local Hannaford they make care packages of food at the holidays which I was able to purchase and donate with my regular groceries, and I am working with a family member in creating artwork for Olivia's Heart Fund.

These donations are local, and the charities and businesses that are involved make it easy to participate in a very direct way. But for the larger charities and relief aid for tragic events around the globe are a step removed, and the number of charities that are asking for donations are overwhelming. I am on the email list for Mercy Corps and The American Red Cross, but I want my money to make the highest possible impact since I can choose who I will participate with in helping the cause of Haiti and others. So I want to share another great resource, Charity Navigator.

Charity Navigator is a website that analyzes the data for charities so that you can get a better idea of where that donation you make is actually going. Right on the home page is information about aid for Haiti, and a link to a page of charities participating in the relief effort.

I can easily choose a charity that I know will be legitimate, and get a synopsis of the type of aid they will be supplying. Because the financial data on these charities has already been evaluated, I can see a star rating (out of four stars) of their level of efficiency.

Now as much as I love both Mercy Corps and the Red Cross, I see that right now they each have a three-star rating, and there are quite a few other charities that are rated higher. I followed the links to a few, and chose Americares and Oxfam to add to my charities (have to log in to a free account for this feature).

On the "my charities" page, I can check off several charities and compare statistics. I love this feature - now I can see  in detail where they spend their donations.

If you want to make a donation to help those who have been devastated by the earthquake, or any other cause, I'd recommend that you check out the Charity Navigator website. It's good to know who is legit, and get a better picture of where your donation is going, so that it can have the greatest impact.

Some handy website resources

I have attended a couple of art group meetings recently where the use of website tracking utilities has come up in the conversation. For artists that have a blog or portfolio online, there are some free tools available to promote your work, and track the visitors to your websites. Here are a few of the tools that I have used and find helpful.

Google has added profiles to their generous list of online applications. You can create a web profile that you want the world to see. If you are a creative and someone Googles your name, there may be some listings that come up, but maybe not all of the work you really want to display. By creating a Google profile you can expand on those links with exactly the content you want people to see. You can list your work history, a bio, your location and websites, attach picasa or web photo albums and more. It's a great way to be found on the web. Here's an example with my Google profile. 

Statcounter is a free website that allows you to insert an html tag into your blog/website. You can create multiple projects (one for each website) and monitor who visits your site, the path that got them there, the visitor's location, how long they visited each page, keywords used to find your site and more. Now I know that a couple of people actually read my blog, and see that they mostly visit from facebook, etc. Very handy.

Google analytics is another free tool that has the same capabilities. I use that for my blog and it's got a lot of bells and whistles, but I find statcounter more intuitive for me. Statcounter will only show the 500 most recent records though, and I believe GA has no limits. Google's tool seems to be more about analyzing trends rather than drilling down to unique visitor information.

Google also has some webmaster tools that will crawl your website and report back how many pages on the web are linked to your site pages, and give you a site map indicating all your website pages and how they are linked. There are lots of help links to show you about search engine optimization, etc. if you want to really dig into that info.

Compete.com is a website that compares estimates of user data from the top 1,000,000 consumer websites. While many of the features of compete require a subscription, and are targeted at businesses, I found that the free comparisons of several websites to be of benefit to my fine art career. I was able to compare traffic between etsy.com and artfire.com to see which site had more traffic, and determine where I would like to sell my art online.  I could make similar comparisons of print-on-demand websites, etc. You can compare up to three websites at a time for different time periods.

More holiday paintings

I got lucky and managed to free up a block of time for another small painting. For this one I thought I would paint a New England winter bird. We see cardinals all the time here in Douglas, and one was out in our backyard when we were shoveling in the last storm.

Winter cardinal  6" x 4" acrylic