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
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