Category Archives: Oil Painting

On choosing a hosting platform and why I shouldn’t build a house

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Oh y’all! I wrote to you ages ago saying I was going to share my journey into the business side of the art world. And I still am, really! It’s just taking me a minute. When I left off I was in the process of trying to create a WordPress.org site. In case you missed that part, here’s a link to the post. In short, WordPress.org is actually a plug-in that you use on a website hosted by a hosting platform (more on that in a minute), WordPress.com (where we are right now) is like it’s own little world. So, it’s sorta like building your own house based on designs by a contractor named WordPress (.org) or living in a apartment building where you can decorate how you like, but you can’t paint the walls and changing the furniture is pretty much where your control ends (.com).

It’s a good thing I’m not building an actual house, because if so, we’d be sitting in the rain while I tried to choose a floor plan. First off, I had to settle on a hosting site. This just means the company with the powerful computers that gets your site out there on the internet and keeps it running. I started off with Siteground, based on someone’s recommendation. However, despite everyone else RAVING about their customer service, I found some things lacking. They were very nice, but I had problems like never receiving a callback, though I had scheduled one, etc. Also, I felt like they had a slight lack of understanding just HOW little I knew. So, then I went with GoDaddy. Their customer service is incredible. I never feel dumb talking to them. However, I’m also always aware of just HOW good their sales team is. I found out that I have to pay extra (on top of the already substantial amount I was paying) to get a security certificate, which rumor has it Google is going to start requiring. If you don’t have one (which I hear is really not a big deal) you get that little tag on the search bar that says “site not secure” or something similar. So, I switched again (I’m probably starting to develop a bit of a reputation in the hosting world). Finally, I went to Bluehost just because WordPress endorses them. Honestly that process exhausted me so much that’s the last thing I’ve done. I can’t even tell you if Bluehost is working out for me because I just had to step away from all that for a bit.

I did transfer all my posts, pictures, etc. from here to the new (not yet live) site. Now THAT was a thing that was a problem I worked out on my own (GooooO me!). I’ll tell y’all about that next time and we’ll continue this (longer than I anticipated) journey.

In the meantime, keep painting and I’ll see you soon.

Hands hands hands

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I love to paint hands. Love them. All the joints and angles and fat parts and skinny parts and knobby parts… are your palms sweating just thinking about it?  I, too, used to cringe when I got to hands- all the joints and angles make them a bit of a challenge. Make the fat parts too fat and you get sausage fingers. Too skinny and you get E.T. But get those angles right and… ah, satisfaction. Now, they’re my favorites. So, for practice(and for fun):

Since I’m working on a mid-value background, I layout the general shape, then establish my darks.
Keeping the greenish middle value in mind for the greener areas of my skin, next I lay down the lighter areas
I travel back and forth between dark and light, and really try to capture the color temperature as well
Typically I work with an easel, but in this case I had my panel laying flat so that I could view it from approximately the same angle as the model… by which I mean my hand.
To avoid getting too detailed too soon, I lay my shapes in broadly, with the intention of smoothing and blending later.
By laying the paint down broadly, I can get a feel for the form.
I’m careful about the amount of blending I do. I want the painting to look finished, but I don’t want it to lose its shape.
Almost there.
Finishing touch.

Click on the images above for more details on my process.

Oh, and here’s my palette. Because that’s fun too!

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Look at all the pretty colors… and not one of them labeled as a flesh tone. Reality lies between the lines.

If I was painting someone with a darker skin tone, I would likely use many of these same colors. However, I’d spend more time up top, at the darker end of my color strings. And, of course, the opposite holds true for fair-skinned folk, whose skin tones lie in the lower third of my palette.

So, go out and paint something that scares you. Maybe next I’ll tackle feet… or profiles. Eeek…

Every Picture Tells a Story

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This is Baby Monkey. My little girl’s best buddy. Her constant companion for the better part of her life. So loved is Baby Monkey that I worried about her safety, constantly checking to see that she hadn’t been left behind at stores, hotels, airports. The perfect size to clutch in a chubby little 3-year-old fist, she went everywhere with us.

But my little girl isn’t 3 anymore. She’s 6. Tall, headstrong, funny, bold. Baby Monkey stays home most of the time nowadays, no longer making trips to the grocery store and school. Recently, though, after a long day out my daughter said, “I want to go home. I want to go home and see Baby Monkey.”

Still special. Still loved.

Hello, darlin… nice to see ya

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It’s been a long tiiiime…

Hello there stranger! How the heck are ya? Do you even remember me? I’m sure that’s questionable. Remember in my last post I promised you that I would tell you soon what was keeping me so busy. Apparently I lied. I apologize.

See here’s the deal. I had a baby! I say that like it just happened. Oh no. It wasn’t recent. It was so long ago now I’m embarrassed to say. Embarrassed because while a new baby might be a reason to neglect a blog, a 20-month-old, despite the fact that he’s into everything, seems like less of an excuse. The thing is that while I expected that to mean extra work, no one told me that the craziness increases exponentially with each child so that 2 children is somehow through some mathematical mystery 4 times the work. I would imagine that people with 6 children never ever stop moving and never take in any sustenance but the last drops in the bottom of a juice box and the 1/2 a chicken nugget child #4 dropped on the floor that the dog failed to notice. So hats off to those of you that make multiple children look easy. But I digress. Where was I? Ah yes. Kid x 2= Work². However, it’s also Fun², so while there’s extra cleaning messes, laundry, correcting, containing, and refereeing, etc; there’s also extra snuggling, kissing, teaching, learning, and laughing. It’s good. It’s great! But it is busy.

I am very happy to say, though, that work as been busy as well. I’ve done several commissions which I have really really enjoyed. I love the collaboration involved in helping someone flesh out what they want in a painting and bringing it to life. My commissions have ranged from an oil painting done from an old photograph of the client and her mother, to a traditional portrait, to a portrait of a beloved stuffed bunny, to tiny boots and baby knees (plus a couple of pet portraits not shown here). The work has been varied, but so so good with each piece presenting its own challenges, learning opportunities, and rewards. I’ll probably go into detail about some of these in future posts, but for now here’s a brief glimpse of what I’ve been up to since the new kid came along:

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The “Skin”ny on Skin

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Forgive the title…I’m kind of a dork…

Yowzah it’s been a long time since I posted! So long that I forgot my password to log on to my site! I have been very very busy with things that I will share with you at a future point. However, for the moment, I’m STILL busy. I do want to show you a piece that I finished a few months ago, though, that I’ve yet to share. It’s a diptych (which is a fancy way of saying that it’s on two panels). I had so much fun with the colors in the skin tones-greens, violets, reds… To anyone reading this who is not a (totally obsessed with tiny details, value shifts, and color changes) realist artist, that statement probably sounded weird. I mean, caucasian hands should be painted in caucasian flesh tone, right? Yeah right, and grass is green and apples are red. Ok, well, those last two are true even though much more goes into those than meets the eye as well. But skin… how can I begin!? Skin is an organ, right? The largest organ of your whole entire body. It is a living thing with blood flow, covering muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones. And because it’s translucent, those elements underneath affect the color of the skin on top.  So, take that complexity and add to it some other factors like form, light, shadow, the hills and valleys that make it look like a hand instead of just a lump of peach or brown clay and it gets pretty colorful. Your amazing brain is so amazing that it takes in all those details and processes them without you even noticing, then says simply to you, “That? That’s a hand.” So, take a minute. Look at the back of your hand. Wiggle your fingers and notice how the shape of the shadows changes as you do so. Pretty cool, huh? Now tell me, what color is your skin?

Tug of Love

Tug of Love, detail

Wish Her Luck!

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My painting, “Love Letter to the Here and Now” has been accepted into the Meridian Museum of Art’s Bi-State Annual Art Competition. IMG_3651Last week I hand delivered the painting to the museum in downtown Meridian, MS. With a bit of nervousness and one last loving look I left my brainchild in the capable hands of the museum staff. Good luck, Little One!

Love Letter to the Here and Now

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Hey y’all, remember me? Ages ago I posted (here!) the beginnings of a portrait I was doing of my little girl. However, I just realized I never shared the completed painting. So, I present to you “Love Letter to the Here and Now.”

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“Love Letter to the Here and Now” by Erin Hardin- Oil on Linen

The title speaks to both the fact that the prototypical “dad with the video camera” is using a smartphone to record his child’s accomplishments.

Detail from "Love Letter to the Here and Now"

Detail from “Love Letter to the Here and Now”

However it also truly is a love letter to my here. My now. Which I have to say, is pretty great.

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My here. My now.

Let’s Try This Again, Part III

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Bit by bit I’m moving along on this painting. I’m loving it, but my little one has decided naps are for chumps so I’m not getting to work on it much. That’s ok. Next week she starts pre-school so I’m trying to soak up every sweet, frustrating, fun, non-work productive, bonding, silly, frivolous, educational, and mundane moment with her. I have the rest of my life to work. Here and there, though, I have made some progress on it.

Last post I showed you my rub-out underpainting:

Now for the fun part- color! Here’s what I’ve done so far, plus a couple of detail shots.

Don’t you love skin tones? Look at all the colors in there- greens, pinks, violets- and I can promise you there’s not a bit of pre-mixed “Caucasian Flesh Tone” on my palette. Where would be the fun in that?