THE PAST THREE DAYS

A lot has happened the past three days on the mural. Novatek has a big VIP meeting coming up next week (September 26-30). In this building where the mural is currently being painted, a conference room was just finished and in time for the big event while Novatek plays host. Earlier this year, I was contracted to provide original paintings for three conference rooms on the Novatek campus and 9 supervisor's offices. Recently, Novatek decided to place artwork in all the main offices (30 offices). To do so, they commissioned me to provide gilclee" prints of my work instead. On this blog, I posted the new gilclee", fresh from the printer/framer shop. I was pleased with the result. If you don't know what you're looking at, you would think it was an original oil. We are also loaning one of my 5' x 6' originals of Timpanogos for the event, to fill another wall in this same conference room. We plan to use this original as well as some of my other paintings for gilclee's to fill the walls of their other offices.

I showed up to the mural project site early last Saturday morning to work in the foreground. Normally, I've been taking Saturdays off, to do yard work or go plein air painting. Several weeks ago, the client asked me how far along the mural would be when the big VIP meeting takes place. I told him it would be about to the half-way mark. I realized a few days ago, I wouldn't be to this half way point, unless I really pushed hard. We worked from 6 a.m. to  5 p.m. on Saturday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Monday and from 7 a.m. to almost 5 p.m. Tuesday. Whew! Now we are at the half way point. I will spend the next couple days doing clean up and touch up (removing the masking, removing all my paint, equipment and supplies and cleaning off paint drips on the floor... Oops!), so the shop looks really good for the event. The client has asked me to take the week of the 26th - 30th off for the event. I plan to get caught up on errands, etc. I hope to also do some plein air painting and some studio painting as well during the week. My goal is to prepare at least 30 originals and 6 gilclee's for an event in Scottsdale, Arizona I will be involved in from January 14th to March 26th this winter (2012). I am one busy hombre'. Many of these originals will become gilclee's for Novatek's offices.

When I return back on the job in the first week of October, my focus will zero in on color harmony. This means, every color juxtaposed side-by-side to each other must be harmoniously in key. It's just like playing beautiful harmonies on a well tuned piano. If one chord or one piano key is off, this messes up the whole piece of music. It is the same for visual art. Every color note must be right on. I figure that it will take the entire month of October to do this since the picture plane is so gargantuan.

A PRODUCTIVE DAY IN SPITE OF IT'S BEGINNING

I'm trying to finish the Middle Value phase of my mural painting process by tomorrow early afternoon so I can get approval to bill for another payment on the mural by this weekend. All of the managers I have to go through to get approval, will be on vacation Wednesday through Saturday of this week. Because of this self imposed deadline, I'm really hustling to reach my goal by tomorrow. Today I worked 12 hours, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. I actually left for work at 5:30 a.m. this morning, but because of a traffic jam caused by a multi-car accident, I was stranded for about 45 minutes. It actually only takes about 15 minutes to get to the project site from where I live. I could have started an hour earlier had the accident not occurred. Just in case, tomorrow I'm taking the back roads to work so I can start work by 6 a.m. In spite of the late start, I was able to reach my painting goal for the day. The goal wad to finish the grasses and lay in the basic colors for the middle ground. Tomorrow, I'm going to get all the trees done and a few other minor odds and ends in the mural --- and all this by mid-afternoon. I;m starting to get some pleasing color relationships.