Visual Art Gifts

I’m sure some frequent visitors are wondering what’s happened at VisualArtGifts.com since I haven’t posted for a while.  I’ve been having serious problems with my ISP causing me to be without service for weeks at a time and when I am online, I give priority to getting my artwork uploaded to Imagekind, Redbubble, and Zazzle then making products at Zazzle with those works. It all takes time and getting it all done when I have service has interrupted my routine of writing a post with each new work that I like.

The gallery pages of my work at Imagekind and the Gift pages of my work at Zazzle are automatically updates daily using RSS feeds which means that they update with new work within a day of uploading new artwork to those sites.

Site Software Updated

New versions of WordPress and BuddyPress have also come out in the last month and I just finished two days of upgrading those and my plugins so that software is up-to-date.  The New BuddyPress version (used for the community features here) completely changed the template and made changes to the API so  over a day was spent on completely redesigning the default template to more or less match my old design’s colors and style. I will be making a few more changes in the near future to bring it closer and I might update my old style in subtle ways too.    If you noticed The main blog here looking strange, you were just seeing my changes in progress as I broke down and put back together the design.

New Header Graphic

The change that most people will notice is the new header graphic of a paintbrush which I digitally painted just for the header this morning. No, it isn’t perfect, nor was it intended to be. I just wanted to do something quick and fun.  If I wanted it to be perfect, I’d take a photo of it

In lesson 5 of the Learn and Master Painting course, we start by practicing with a gradient. I’m not going to bother photographing my gradient work. Then we learn how to make hard and soft edges of different types. The teacher shows many different examples of hard, soft, and lost edges and you can follow along and make your own. It is great how she takes painting step by step and I like how unlike a real class, I can go back – months later – and watch a section of the DVD painting video again.

Christmas Tree in Forest Painting by Christopher Johnson

Lesson 5 ends with the painting of an evergreen tree with other trees merging in the background. Her evergreen tree is much prettier than mine, but I guess that is to be expected.  In this painting she shows us how to use negative space around objects and we continue to practice varied strokes.  We also learn massing to create the tree in the middle of the work.