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

The largest painting that I have done so far...

This is a repost of something I had previously written a couple months ago...

I thought I would blizzog about this painting because it is the largest that I have done so far, but also because the material comes with a bit of a story...

My wife used to work for a property management company downtown... one day her maintenance guys were cleaning out their storeroom and came across 3 big panels of masonite with odd stripes of tan paint randomly placed here and there with some black marker 'tags' scribbled over the top of some of the paint. Each masonite panel had been drilled in each of the 4 corners (for hanging, I assume), and all of the corners were all banged up and some were broken. It turns out that the panels had been a 'gift' to one of the previous employees from years before, and they had been left behind, unwanted...

Well when my wife saw the panels she instantly thought of my paintings so she saved them and asked me if I could use them. The next time I was at her office she showed me the panels... I looked at them curiously and began to lay them out on the floor side by side until I could make out the pattern of the stripes in order to try and understand what the 'artist' was trying to do. It ended up being graffiti... I guess... I hesitate to call it that because I am a HUGE fan of graffiti as an art form, and I absolutely HATE to see it poorly done. The 'artist' had used tan paint on brown masonite board, applied it very sloppily in thick random stripes, and THEN with a black marker they had done little 'gang-style tag' signatures here and there all over the pieces. I enjoy graffiti in many forms & styles, and this was pretty lacking in every way... needless to say it was going to be thrown out anyway if I hadn't claimed it for material purposes.

So I took the panels home and they stood against the pole in my garage for months til I was finally ready to start something so large. Because of the size of it I knew that I wanted it to be well done and not just thrown together. I had also debated about whether I would paint 1 piece across the 3 panels as the original 'artist' had done or if wanted to do 3 individual pieces on each of the 3 panels. Well I eventually decided on the latter choice... I laid the panel out on one of my biggest tables and primed it with white to try to help cover the previously applied paint.

Once it was primed, and I had settled on a basic theme, composition & color-scheme, I started the piece... I did the planet textures, shading & highlights on the 1st night and then let it sit for a couple days -- I knew that the rest of the painting would take a little while and I wanted to make sure that I had plenty of time and wasn't rushed. And a couple days later I started again... I finished out the atmosphere, the mountains, & the foreground relatively quickly, definitely sooner than I had expected when I started that night.

As far as the finished product... I ended up being really happy with the piece. I wasn't sure when I started it... I figured I'd either love it, or consider it just another space painting and add it to the pile. But instead I ended up cherishing it. Because of it's size I dont know if it will ever sell -- at least not until I can get it into a gallery or large venue (larger than my usual gig anyway)... but I'm happy just having it for myself - and it's definitely a great size to have at shows because it really gets ppl's attention!

Here's the painting (below), althought the image doesn't really do it justice... now that I'm happy with the 1st panel I can't wait to get started on the others! Perhaps the next panel will be a landscape!

"Untitled - 10347" Reclaimed Masonite, approximately 34x60

I wish it would snow... somewhere else!

Man... I pretty much hate snow... yeah I know - it's hard for a lot of ppl to believe that someone would hate snow - but yeah, I hate snow. And that fact makes living here in the Midwest even more unfortunate. If it were possible to relocate I'd want to live somewhere that's warm year round... I remember many years ago when I was younger I visited southern CA for about 2 weeks in the middle of December... when I left here it was a snowstorm and when I arrived at LAX it was in the upper 50's - in the middle of December. Now that's the kind of weather I'd like to have during the most miserable 2-3 months of the year!

My very first Live Show (reposting from another site)...

This is an old entry that I have posted on another site - but I feel that it belongs here... it's from back when I was first starting out with this art form...

June 12, 2008:
This past weekend, June 7th-8th, I had a booth at a festival called The Good Ol Days. It's an annual event that brings thousands of spectators. My wife and I usually go to the event - this is the first time being part of it. There was approximately 450 vendor booths, a few live bands, food vendors, and other live performances. I was originally given a booth in the middle of a row, but once the chairlady found out what I did she 'upgraded me' to one of the best spots in the festival. She said she realized that I would be more of an attraction than just a regular vendor. Yeah - no pressure there for my first live show! :p

But unfortunately it ended up being one of the windiest Good Ol Days in the festival's history, and I only got to paint once out of both days. It was so windy that some of the vendors' ez-ups were getting ripped apart or broken up. Vendors were losing their crafts and goods to the wind, and some vendors even left the show a day early because of the weather conditions. My family and I spent a majority of the weekend holding down our display so it wouldn't fly across the street! I had cinder blocks on all 4 corners of my ez-up and there were a couple times where they still lifted off the ground. It was nuts! And I had a couple of paintings fly off of my display boards and jack up the corners here and there.

Early Saturday afternoon I was hiding in my booth and I realized that I didn't have a sign for my stuff, so i crouched down between my tables with the intent of making a quick 20x30 sign with a planet, mountains & trees on the right side and then my name on the left side... I started doing the planet, looked up and realized there was about 10 ppl watching me. I kinda smiled a half smile, and started adding stars... looked up and there were a few more ppl... then I started adding mountains & water - still just kind of halfa$$ working 1 side of the board... when I was ready to add the text on the left I looked up and there was close to twenty ppl crowded into my ezup and staring down at me. I kind of made a joke about how I was just making a sign for my booth and there were a few smiles... but I liked the fact that I was finally painting - so I added another planet on the left side w/ more mountains, water, stars etc and blended the 2 sides into each other making one unified painting. Then the wind picked up my booth and blew a couple of my paintings off the table - I jumped up to grab my stuff and everyone kind of dispersed. BUT about an hour later a guy and his wife came back around and asked to purchase the painting that I had done in front of everyone, and they also bought an 11x14 'cross' painting to go with it. That was my first sale for the weekend. =)

Oh and also by the way - we started the festival with 2 walls up on the ezup to help block the wind, but it actually made things WORSE and turned my ezup into more of a big sailboat, so we ended up taking the walls down.

Anyway - all in all I sold 5 paintings: (3)-20x30 paintings and (2)-11x14.

Here's some pics of my booth...

blogging just for the sake of blogging...

It seems that nowadays EVERYONE has a blog and they're blogging about EVERYTHING. No matter what topic you might be interested in chances are you can do a simple search and find thousands of people blogging about it. Granted, some of it might be absolute gibberish or nonsense - but a huge portion of what you find might actually be useful... or entertaining... or at the very least not a complete waste of your time by reading it. In a sense, I too have been adding my 2 cents to the online world of commentary - but to officially call it a 'blog' -- now that's taking 2 steps forward. So here I am -- officially calling it what it is... a blog. Hopefully it will be useful to some... or at least entertaining to others... or at the very minimum perhaps not a complete waste of my reader's time. Please feel free to contact me through the site and let me know if you'd like to see a particular direction or train of thought and... we'll see how it goes. Check back often! ~munden