olive hue

A Creative Life, artistic inspirations, Dogs in Art, fine art, handmade books, sketchbook, small things, still life

Olives are one of the many ways adults know they are loved. Grapes too. But I’ve been thinking about olives. Olives to eat. Olives in Dirty Martini’s. And how if you say “olive hue” it sounds a lot like “I love you”.

Olives have to be picked from the olive trees carefully – then preserved and processed – lots of work is done just so we can enjoy them. In all of their salty, brine-y, yummy glory. There. I feel loved. Don’t you?

Anyway here’s artwork I did recently while these thoughts ran around my brain (brine?) jar:

InSearchOfTheHolyGrail72

In Search Of The Holy Grail – by Clancy – 7 x 5 inches – acrylic and gouache on board

Allegedly you can grow olives here in the Pacific Northwest. There is at least one local bar that serves drinks with “Local Oregon Olives”. (Note to self: Explore this more.)

Speaking of drinks – one of my favorites is the “Dirty Martini”. With extra olives of course.  Here’s a drawing I did of my currently favored recipe:

P15

Sketchbook page from “Time Tavern” – you can see the full book here: https://www.sketchbookproject.com/library/20467

Happy weekend!

finished art of a peel

A Creative Life, art exhibit, art gallery, cat portrait, Cats in art, fine art

Here’s the finished artwork I was working on in my last blog post art-of-a-peel. I’ve titled it “Purrfecting Happy Hour”.  Now… on to the next painting…

PurrfectingHappyHour72

Purrfecting Happy Hour by Clancy 36 x 24 x 2 inches (h x w x d) Handmade paper and acrylic on cradled board

art of a peel

A Creative Life, animals in art, artist book, cat portrait, Cats in art, creative thinking, drawing as thinking, fine art, sketchbook

I’ve been busy lately working on a new fine art piece that has an orange peel in it. And a cat of course. Here’s a picture of me at work…

ClancyAtWorkPurrHappyHour72.jpg

Between 7 and 14 of us get together once a month for happy hour in one of our local pubs, and the trays of drinks that arrive at our table often reminds me of a jewelers tray. So I’m trying to capture that festive feeling in my painting.

This has meant, as I’ve worked on my composition (the to-scale drawing you see to the right in the above photo), a practice of sketching various drinks in my kitchen sketchbook. I used ink and gouache in my sketchbook – and I’m using acrylic in the painting. Below is the first sketchbook practice drawing; the drink recipe, an orange hot toddy, turned out very well in the real-life tasting of it – the drawing in my sketchbook of the orange-peel didn’t turn out so well.

OrangeToddyBest72

But I remembered the phrase “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first” from my book, Dr. Bob’s Emotional Repair Program First Aid Kit, and kept going.

In other sketchbook pages I tried more orange-peel attempts and here below is the last sketchbook orange-peel drawing – and the drink recipe that I decided to use within the painting.

FlatironMartini72

Below is a close-up photo of the drinks I’ve put in the painting – including the one with the orange peel:

TrayDetail72.jpg

I’ll post a photo of the finished art when its, well, finished – there’s still more to do on the cat.

Time Tavern traveling

A Creative Life, animals in art, artist book, artistic inspirations, Dogs in Art, ebook, graphic narrative, public art, The Sketchbook Project, visual story, words and pictures

I’ve finished my sketchbook for the Brooklyn Art Library’s Sketchbook Project, packed it up and put it into the postal slot. But before I did that I created an ebook version of the book – and a video.  I was going to post more photos of work-in-progress and such – but I’ve gotten very busy so… you can download-to-own an ebook version here. And below is the video…

 

time to gouache

A Creative Life, art techniques, artist book, Dogs in Art, sketchbook, The Sketchbook Project, visual story

As you know I’ve been playing with my new gouache paints in my various sketchbooks and art papers, practicing for my work on “Time Tavern”, a book I’m doing for the Brooklyn Art Library Sketchbook Project. https://www.brooklynartlibrary.com/  Now that I feel I have gouache skills under my belt – it’s time to work on my wordless story “Time Tavern”.

Here are some pages in progress:

The gouache is working well on the paper – and I’m getting the bold colors I’d wanted! Now, to keep at it….