HAPPY ACCIDENTS ARE A GOOD THING!

The last time I blogged, I reported about the two man-lifts out of charge so I shifted gears, turned back to using my ladder and thinned my artist oil colors so I could roll the paint on instead of hand brushing it onto the surface. In the past, on a mural of this scale, I would block in a variety of acrylic latex base colors with a roller to cover all the white surface quickly. We were painting directly onto the drywall surface, so I felt okay about using commercial grade industrial paints. With the paint suppliers help, we would try to match their acrylic latex interior industrial paint to match a few main colors from the mural sketch concept. Even though they did pretty good, most of the time I ended up having to paint over 96%+ of it, because the colors were not nailed down exact. I also never got the hang of blending the acrylics to my satisfaction, even with glazing mediums. After covering the white surface with the acrylics, it always felt good to return to good old reliable oils. The other day, when I ended up having to resort to ladders, thinned down artist oil colors and a roller, I decided it worked pretty well to cover the surface faster than with a brush and I can also eyeball mix any oil color from my pallet, nailing it right on. Since I was young, dad trained me to mix colors from the artist pallet. Dad was also a full-time artist and a well known colorist.

One day, during an art class in High school, the teacher gave each student a piece of paper about 3 ft. x 4 ft. with nearly one hundred different color samples mixed from her pallet. Her intention was to teach the students how to learn color mixing and keep them busy for a week trying to mix and match each color. I turned in this assignment by the end of the class the day she handed it out to us. She was surprised that I mixed and matched them all near perfectly and to do it so quickly. It was a challenge for the teacher to find assignments to keep me busy. After I met this challenge, she gave me the assignment to paint a mural of the school mascot (a bobcat) in the High School gymnasium. This was my first mural. At the age of 16, this was a big accomplishment for me. Besides being a gallery artist,  my dad had a sign business in Rexburg, Idaho where I grew up. Of course, it was an advantage that I had helped my dad hand paint signs since the age of ten. Scaling up the sketch for the mural was a piece of cake (a good old sign trick). The project was so much fun, I decided then and there that mural painting would be included in my fine art career. Like scaling up a sketch, I still use some tricks I learned in the sign business on my mural work today. I also employ many principles I learned from my fathers annual summer fine art plein air school. I was very blessed to grow up with this background. My father believed in Hard Knox and he provided it for us. In college, I was able to challenge many fine art classes and received the credit without having to take the specific art class. At Ricks College, I was awarded 9 credits toward my Associates Of Art Degree automatically, because of my solid art training at home. Many years later, I attended BYU in Utah to work toward my BFA. The Art Department at BYU awarded me 44 credits based on what I had proven during my professional career as an artist. I still have about 11 credits to finish my BFA, if I ever decide to finish it. In fine art, what matters to art dealers and art collectors is talent and quality, not whether or not you have a degree. College degrees are a left brain thing. Artists are right brain things (or something like that).

Since using the paint roller and nailing the base colors with my artist oil colors worked out so well, I was able to block in most of the foreground colors today. My goal is to cover the entire white surface with color by week's end and it looks like I'm going to make it!