It's been a while...

It's been a while since the last time I posted... here's a brief update:
the past couple months have been pretty hectic for me & my family but things are finally calming down now. We just bought a house and have moved! and now we're getting things unpacked and placed and trying to adjust and create a new flow to our lives. Things are coming together great. As far as my painting goes -- I'm working on creating a new paint booth area at our new place and hopefully I'll be fully-functional asap!

Sold A Few Paintings Over The Weekend!

Over this past weekend I entered a show that I haven't participated in before... and I'm usually reluctant and skeptical when approaching a new show because I never know what to expect. But this time, although it was off to a slow start, I'm really glad that I was there because it ended up being well-worth it in more ways than one!

The booth space for this show was free, so there was no real harm in entering -- other than that of dragging all of my setup gear out for only the 2nd time this year, and dragging my family out to an event that wasn't far from home, but too far to be close. So I was definitely hopeful that at least selling 1 painting would make it worth while... not that I don't enjoy the experience of it all, because I really do, but selling definitely outweighs experience pretty much every time!

Well, to keep a long story relatively reasonable in length, it was a great time... the weather was beautiful, the breeze kept me on my toes, my family was there along with my mom and my brother's family... I had good friends stop by to see my work, I painted for a while, gave a pretty good demonstration of the techniques that I use (despite the dry heat that was making the paint set up way faster than usual)... and by the end of the day I had sold 4 paintings! (two of which were my large 20x30 on FoamCore, one 14x22 on Posterboard, and one 11x14 on Posterboard)

What's funny is that no matter how long I've had a piece, and no matter how many times I show a piece then put it away at the end of the show, it's still hard to let go of them when someone decides that they want to purchase one. It's funny how they become my favorites, and when they get bought I really just hope that whoever buys them will enjoy them as much as I do/did and I always hope that they end up proudly on a wall to be admired, giving them a life of their own beyond my efforts of displaying them from show to show. This past weekend I sold some favorites... my absolute favorite large space painting, one of my favorite large black & white nature paintings, my absolute favorite medium sized space painting, and one of my newest favorites -- a small nature painting that I had just painted early last week... guess I'll have to get to work so that I can fill the holes in my display!

~munden
11x14 on Posterboard

New Images In The Galleries

I've just added and updated the site... I've added 3 new images to the NATURE Gallery, 3 new images to the CITYSCAPES Gallery, and 1 new image to the MISC Gallery. I've also updated the home page with a larger version of one of my new paintings, although I'm happy to announce that it is NOT for sale because it was purchased over this past weekend!

Hopefully everyone is enjoying the site -- I'll post more when I get a chance!Thanks for reading...
~munden

I've added and updated my site...

MundensPaint.com has received a couple of new upgrades and also has a few new images added to the galleries!

First and foremost, I've added a new section to the Home page that will feature one of my recent paintings. I realize that there's a sidebar on the right of every page of my site that shows 4 recent paintings, HOWEVER, I wanted to have a main image on the Home page that would do the same thing, except on a larger scale. That way there's a new fresh image on the Home page that will change every so often as I add new work to the site.

I've also added a couple of new Landscape paintings to the NATURE Gallery that I recently finished and finally got good digi pics of them to post here on the site. On top of that I've also been working on a few new landscapes for a side project, AND have also been working on some new Cityscapes and skyline paintings! As soon as I get good pics and if I have enough of them to show then I will be adding a new gallery just for Cityscapes!

^-^ Click the image above to go to the Galleries! ^-^

I painted today... 2 new pieces...

I painted today... 2 new pieces... both are nighttime nature paintings...

As soon as I am able to get some digi pics of them I'll definitely be adding them to the galleries!

~munden

I've posted new work in my online galleries...

I realize that this is a bit overdue, but I finally posted some new work in my online galleries... It's not exactly recent - it's paintings that I did during a couple of warm days near the end of January and in mid-February. It took a while for me to get good pics of them because the weather's been bad and I always take pics of my work outside - it's usually the best light and seems to offer the best visual representation of the colors in my paintings.

Although you're definitely more than welcome to go to the galleries and have a look around at EVERYTHING, the easiest way to view my most recently added work is to click on "GALLERIES"... then just above my various albums you'll see a link that says "Recently Added"... Click that and it will pull up all of my images in order from most recent to oldest... and the top 8 are the ones I added last night. There's also a block of images on the right of every page that shows Recent Photos, but it doesn't always pull images from the most recent batch of uploads.

Unfortunately the work that I added last night isn't anything too dramatic or technically demanding... it was actually more of me just trying to stay active and in practice in hopes of surviving the cold winter with some skills still in tact. I waited for warm days (above 50!) to where I could paint a few paintings without having to overload my remaing space heater (I lost the other one just before Christmas - poor little guy).

But now the warm weather is finally here... well - it was anyway! It's been in the 60's & 70's for the past few weeks... yet today we're supposed to be hit with a WINTER STORM, 4 to 8 inches of snow... and then warm again within a day or two. Gotta love that Midwest weather!

Items for sale through my site...

I have recently added a new "FOR PURCHASE" section to my site. It currently will only showcase 5 of my works at a time and I will continue to update new items and switch them around from time to time. HOWEVER there is still plenty of paintings in my Galleries that are available yet may not be listed on my For Purchase page. If there is a painting that you're interested in that is not listed on the For Purchase please contact me through the CONTACT page and I will get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks!

I Need A Studio...

Well here it is, the end of January... I'm surviving the winter, but not really the most optimistic or jovial guy lately... I haven't gotten to paint much this winter because of our new situation.

Last year it was a lot easier because we were in a house with a 2 car garage with LOTS of extra space for me to screen off a makeshift paint booth... And even though it was a little cool in the [barely insulated] garage, with the space heater on HIGH it was actually pretty reasonable and I painted at least once a week through the winter.

But this year it's a lot more challenging... the uninsulated garage across the parking lot gets very cold, and my little space heater just can't fight it. The side of the can reads "50 degrees" after all... and when it's less it becomes a pain to say the least. So I watch the weather daily... and am hopeful to see a wam day... and am hopeful to be able to be home from work on that day...

On the flip side: our new situation has made a lot of things so much better for my family as a whole... plus our daughter will be arriving SOON (we're about 5 weeks out now) and we've gotten almost everything ready... I'm very happy that my wife convinced me that we needed the change in housing because we are so much better off because of it and things are just getting better and better...

So yes, I am merely a whiny artist complaining about the lack of his artistic outlet, because really the rest of my life is fantastic and there's so much more to come!

And in an effort to keep this entry brief [COMPARED TO THE LAST ONE!] I guess I am done for now...

Christmas Commission...

I received a call at the beginning of December from a woman that had seen my work at a show earlier in the season. At the time of the show she had mentioned that she might want me to do a painting for her that she could give to her husband for Christmas, but she wanted to think about it and get back to me. Now, those of you that are artists (or crafters) know that it's very common to hear this type of thing at a show and honestly you can never be sure whether or not you will hear from them again. That's just the way it is -- you meet a lot of people and talk a lot about your work and if someone ends up getting back to you later then AWESOME!... and if they don't -- no big deal - it is what it is.

Well back to the point... So I received that call at the beginning of December -- she had decided that she wanted to commission me to do a painting for her. The main theme that she wanted was "a mountain biker in a forest" because her husband was really into mountain biking and the painting was to be a Christmas gift for him. We worked out the size & cost, and then she left it up to me as far as the seasonal colors, composition, layout, etc... So because of this I told her that I would see what I could do and then take a couple digital pics of the work to show her -- that way she could determine whether or not it was what she was looking for. So I told her I'd get back to her as soon as I had a chance to get something down.

Unfortunately it was a bad time for me to be trying to paint... for a number of reasons. My wife and I were in the middle of a move from our house in Spring Hill to an apartment in Olathe and things were pretty hectic -- it seemed like we constantly didn't have enough time for anything. We were constantly moving boxes from here to there trying to make the most of what little storage space that we had, and trying to fit a house full of stuff into an apartment is just not feasible so we had to pick and choose what was going in and what needed to stay boxed up! Plus when we were living at the house I was able to setup a paint booth in the garage and still have plenty of space for the cars and storage. Now that we were in the apartment the only place for me to paint was in my 1-car detached garage across the parking lot, which had no insulation whatsoever so basically whatever the temperature was outside was what it was inside. Because of all this I didn't have the space, time, or organization for painting until about a week before Christmas... leave it to me to add stress to a stressful situation by waiting til the last minute. I knew it would be a challenge but I had no idea what I was getting into.

Now that it was crunch time (a week before Christmas!) I started watching the weather closely trying to pick out the warmest day to try and paint... of course it's the middle of December in the Midwest so by "warmest day" I mean ANY DAY ABOVE FREEZING! Well it says on the side of the can that you need at least 50 degrees to paint... and I had tried spraying a little bit throughout December just to see how the paint would react... so I knew that I was going to have to heat up the garage A LOT before painting.

I settled on a day and started the morning by checking the garage... it was nuts. My cans were pretty much frozen!... I started by getting a digital thermometer... I set up my paint table in the middle of my little garage, set out my cans, placed the thermometer in the middle of the table, and turned on my 2 space heaters. My original starting temp was about 35 degrees... I left the heaters on, closed the garage door, went back inside and watched tv for about an hour and a half. Well when I came back out around lunch the temp was showing exactly 50 degrees, so I decided to give it a shot. I painted a quick little B & W as a warm-up (LITERALLY!)... it wasn't too bad, but the paints were all spittin funny and the cans were still really cold in my hand. So I left the heaters on & closed the garage up again... and I went and got lunch for me & my wife... BUT when I came back I found that my garage door had malfunctioned and opened up on its own letting all the heat out! So I had to close the garage door back and let it heat back up again before I could do any more painting. Unfortunately somewhere during this span of time I lost one of my space heaters... the little one... he had a good run but I guess it was too much to bear for the little guy and he decided that he couldn't do any more. lol

Casualties from the day's painting experiment: 2 clogged caps & I seemed to have fried one of my space heaters.

So of course I was still stressing over getting the painting done for the customer, but at least I was starting to get some hope that the concept of painting in my uninsulated garage in the middle of winter could be accomplished... The next day I decided that I would give it another shot despite having 1 less heater to work with and even colder temperatures to fight. When I first turned on the heater it was about 28 degrees in the garage -- 3 hours later it had made it up to about 49 -- good enough because I was tired of waiting! I ended up getting it down pretty quickly (probably because the cans were freezing my fingers) and somewhat close to the image that I had in my head... the trees and the layering of the foliage came through pretty well and fortunately it was warm enough that the paints were working well with each other without any mixing issues or texture problems. By the time I was done with that paint session I had pretty much set the scene for the forest... now all I had to do was wait for the painting to dry completely (without tackiness) so that I could lay down the stencil of the mountain biker. Unfortunately with the garage temperature in the upper 40's it took a few hours before the Rusto stopped being tacky -- and yeah, I could've used the fire to dry it quicker but for one I didn't want to risk taking away any of the vibrance of the colors, plus even when it's warm outside using the fire doesn't always seem to remedy Rusto's tackiness, and most importantly I didn't want to risk destroying the painting. Once it was ready, I added the mountain biker and the foreground, cleared the whole painting with one quick coat, then left it for a few more hours to dry.

Well it worked out, came out pretty good I guess... The next day I took a couple digi pics of the finished painting and emailed them to the customer to get her feedback and see if it was what she was looking for. She called me later that day, left me a message saying that she liked the painting from what she could tell in the pics and wanted to see it in person. After playing voicemail tag a couple times we were able to get together the next evening for her to see it, and she bought it saying that she was pretty sure her husband would love it. I was so relieved... you never know whether the customer is going to really like it and she had left so much of it up to me as far as colors & composition... I'm so glad that she was happy with it.
That was Monday night... Christmas Eve was on Wednesday.

I want to give a special thanks to Jamie Sink for trusting me with the chance to paint a special gift for her husband and I hope they enjoy it for years to come!

Here's the quick digital pic that I emailed to her...

"Mountain Biker In Forest" Commission - 14x22 Posterboard