Finished at last! My new book "Watercolour in Detail"

This is a short presentation video about my new ebook which is now available online for instant download.
The description of the book is as follows:

This ebook in PDF format is primarily written for those who have worked with this medium for some time. Here you will find inspiration for a more advanced and different approach in addition to tips and ideas, practical advice and instruction.

“Watercolour in detail” has 106 pages with 224 illustrations.

Apart from methods, tools and techniques the 14 chapters cover a wide range of subject matter including flowers, animals, people and buildings. Also how to paint the sky and the sea, fruit and vegetables and subjects on the beach. What to take with you when travelling with watercolours and how to find unusual subjects by taking a closer look. A chapter about painting watercolours in large formats covers  important things to consider before starting. The book also dedicates a few pages to mistakes and how to avoid them or correct them when things went wrong anyway.

Finally there are some hints and words of advice about how to look after your finished work.

 If you would like the book it costs 19.95 USD and payment is processed securely by Paypal. Note: The pdf book works on any computer. For iPad just download to your computer first, then transfer it using iTunes.
You can also see more about it at www.elizabethtyler.com

The secret

My disorganised working table in front of the painting: "The secret" acrylics on canvas   40 x 110 cm

Now the ice has melted and the last of the snow has disappeared, revealing the beach again and with it some of my favourite subjects to paint. Stones of all shapes and sizes, dry stones with rough interesting structures, wet stones glistening in the sun, casting shadows and reflecting themselves in the wet sand.
I don’t know why stones fascinate me so much, perhaps it’s just the fact that they are found all over the world that makes them so universal and symbolic.
Jack Penn once wrote: “ One of the secrets of life is to make stepping stones out of stumbling blocks.”

I've thought about that a lot.

There was in fact a seagull standing there between the stones and after hours of painting it in every detail and contemplating over it I finally decided it should be removed. The seagull and the stones stole attention from each other and the calm harmony of the subject was jeopardised. In other words the combination of seagull, sea, stones and sand was just too much and the old saying “Less is more” seemed to be the wisest conclusion here.
Perhaps next time I feel inspired to do some detailed work with a bird I’ll paint it as the main subject in the foreground and render the background without focus and with very soft transitions. But that’s another story.

Latest Exhibition

The Swan, photographed by Ann-Mari Johansson

I have just received  these photographs from my latest exhibition at the art society of Hallstahammar, Sweden.
Everything was extremely well arranged by the society who put a lot of work into the presentation, hanging and PR for the show. There has been lot of positive feedback from both committee members and visitors so I am very happy that the arrangement was possible.
The exhibition was also sponsored by The National Federation of Swedish Art Societies. 
At the opening my video The Swan was shown. An excerpt from it can be seen here

Visitors at the opening, photographed by Ann-Mari Johansson

Still Life

A dialogue between two pears.                                                 watercolour  39 x 47 cm                                                        © Elizabeth Tyler 2012  

The great American floral artist Georgia O'Keefe once said "I hate flowers, I only paint them because they are cheaper than models and they don't move." 

I could personally say the same about painting fruit and still life, I don't normally get inspired by this kind of subject but for once I thought I would give it a try. I ended up enjoying describing the surface of the coarsely woven fabric as a background for the soft smooth pears catching the light and casting soft shadows. 

The tablecloth is painted firstly with prussian blue and then with a thin layer of magenta.

The pears were painted with yellow before adding sap green and finally burnt sienna. 

                         

Self publishing

I'm just putting the finishing touches to my latest book about watercolour painting techniques. It's a book for people who have been painting for some time and need inspiration to take a step further to a more advanced and different approach. It has now 104 pages with 207 illustrations and has been a lot of work but it's something I have wanted to get done for several years. This e-book will very soon (hopefully) be available on the net as a downloadable pdf file. Later I will be publishing it in epub format but this involves creating a new layout which has already taken me months to do so I'll wait a while with that. Here I am checking the visual appearance of the illustrations to make sure the colours are as near the originals as possible when seen on different computers. For this I am using a stationary Imac, a Macbook, an ipad2 and my old PC laptop. The 4 different results I get from these (like in a TV shop) gives me an idea of how the appearance of the images and text can vary. I had to change the colour of the whole text from the more aesthetic light grey I had given it to almost black so that it could be easier to read on an older PC.  Some of the watercolour paintings illustrated in the book can also be seen as videos on YouTube and one of the advantages of an e-book is that you can add such links but it was only after many trials and errors with hyperlinks that everything worked. Another advantage of an e-book is that the reader can zoom in on the pictures and see them even closer than I did when I painted them. This meant that all the images had to be in high resolution. So the book is now 200MB and consequently can't be sent by email but will have to be downloaded from a server, There are apparently several solutions to this, I'll get back to that problem later.

Exhibition

From the Swedish newspaper VLT

At the moment and for the next two weeks my works can be seen at my exhibition at Hallstahammar in central Sweden. Unfortunately I couldn't be there myself for the opening but the local art society did a good job in hanging the 27 lithographs and paintings. According to the regional newspaper's art critic Birgit Ahlberg-Hyse it is unusual for the art society to choose an artist whose work consists of realistic paintings. She goes on to say that " it's easy to be moved by the beauty of Elizabeth Tyler's meticulous work" Finally she wrote: "In the lithographs she renders patterns on stones with photographic exactness and the precision is really impressive. But when she paints an old jetty over an undefined shadow or in a watercolour lets birds wade in diffuse water I find it gratifying with a more personal expression."


I can only say I am grateful to her for saying so.

"Vegetation"  lithograph 20 x 27 cm

"Footprints" lithograph 33 x 15 cm

Roses in January

Roses                   watercolour            95 x 40 cm

In the northern hemisphere the winter can be problematic as far as finding flowers as subject matter for watercolour painting is concerned. Buying cut flowers can solve the problem but not only are they expensive in winter, they are often too stereotype looking and perfect. You can wait a few days for them to open up or wilt a little to let them become more natural or you can do as I did to find roses in January. I went to the nearest flower mart, not to the actual sales area but behind the back where all the goodies are hidden. There the rubbish skip, trash bin or waste bin, whatever you call it, can be a virtual treasure chest for floral artists. 

These were the roses I found, they didn't last very long after coming in from the cold so I had to be quick and concentrated. The background is imagined and the roses, stalks and leaves were actually standing in a bucket of water which for aesthetic reasons, I have omitted.

Showing videos

For several years I've been producing art educational videos on DVD about my painting techniques. A DVD is also great way of presenting paintings and the work behind them and I usually have a computer or TV standing somewhere in the gallery or exhibition hall. Also at the annual "Open Studio" arrangement every Easter the videos are shown. This serves the purpose of adding an extra dimension to the more static impressions of the hanging pictures.
In the beginning I just had a bulky box of a TV with a small screen and a VHS video which didn't really do justice to the artwork. Later when I went on to DVD's shown on a 32" Philips flat-screen TV the image quality was greatly improved. This year I wanted to move on to the MPEG4 technique and bought a Grundig LED TV thinking it would be an even better improvement. I was sooooo very disappointed with the result! As an artist the image quality is of course paramount and you want to see all the tonal differences you've painstakingly put into every painting. With the Grundig all the darks were dead BLACK, hardly no greys at all. Skin tones were magenta and light areas were bleached out to WHITE. I tried everything to adjust the on-screen colours but nothing helped so I returned it to the shop. The dealer then recommended a Samsung*, a little more expensive but the difference is amazing! Now I can show my videos on the TV in normal room lighting, the image quality is superb with vibrant but natural colours and a sharpness I didn't know existed! Being ultra slim it has the extra advantage of being more portable too so it's easier to transport to exhibitions. Apart from full HD it also has a wifi connection thrown in and loads of other goodies and if I ever start experimenting with 3D videos it can show that too.

Excerpts from two of the DVD's can be seen here on my website, I am working on a new one about watercolour techniques which I hope will be finished soon.

PS. *This is not an advertisement for Samsung, just a personal opinion. :-)

Framing

With 5 new watercolours to frame  I'll be spending some time in the basement framing workshop this week. I usually take just a few paintings at a time before the job gets too big and overwhelming. I had intended to paint this series of watercolours all in the same size but it didn't turn out that way, so it will be individual measurements as usual. 

There's a lot of work involved in framing each painting. After the window in the archival cardboard is cut with a bevelled edge, the backing card is measured and cut. Then the lengths of wooden frame moulding are mitred in the guillotine. After that the frames are joined in the underpinner  (no ugly nails) and the glass is cut. Finally there's the meticulous work of mounting and assembling all the elements together with hopefully neither dust nor fingerprints. More often than not I have to open up again to remove a tiny hair or speck of dust that found itself sandwiched in between.

My old faithful Dexter mat cutter, simple but effective.

The Morsø mitring machine.
Note the long supporting channel goes
through a hole to the next room!

An underpinner shoots v-shaped nails into the back of the frame.

Christmas Poppy

It's December and in our garden here in southern Sweden is a flowering poppy. I look out every day to see if it's survived yet another night with cold stormy winds and pouring rain, but there it is with it's head up high. I can't help finding a certain symbolism in the very fact that, against all odds, it's still standing proudly.
I enjoy floral painting especially when it's possible to get very close and examine the details. My fascination with poppies is most likely due to the fact that they only thrive in their own environment, if you pick them and take them indoors they wilt almost immediately and look very sad. I've never before been able to paint a watercolour in the garden in December but here it is, my Christmas poppy.
see the watercolour grow on youtube

Sold to Australia - or no, not quite

Thistle   52 x 72 cm  acrylics on canvas

I often receive mails from interested customers and 2 days ago there was one from Australia.

Hello,
Good day to you over there, My name is Gabriel Wolfgang I'm from Adelaide and
i hope this message finds you well.I was going through your works and my
eyes caught THISTLE & UPWARDS , I am moving soon and i will like to have it for my
new apartment.
please let me know if the piece is available, if yes let me have the
detailed price and more information about it. i will be waiting to read from
you asap.
Gabriel.


I wrote back stating the price,material, technique and size of the painting. The following reply came:

Thanks for the message, I am very happy to know that the piece(Thistle) is still available for sale. i  must tell you i am very much interested in the  purchase because my wife really love it and she want me to get it home before she deliver our upcoming baby boy lol...I will like to let you know that your payment will be in a Cheque.

You don't have to worry about packing, insurance and tax because my shipper will be in the best position to do that as soon as you get the payment.This is because i will be traveling out of the country any moment from now for a business proposal.So get back to me with the information needed to send you the payment  I:E :

Full Name

Standard Address

Phone number

Asking price reconfirmation

so that i can proceed in the payment arrangement, consider it sold get back to me asap with needed information.

Thanks.

Gabriel.

I was just about to reply again that I unfortunately couldn't accept a cheque and that he should pay via paypal instead, when I started to get suspicious about his mail, apart from the bad English I could see that parts of the mail were copied and pasted as the text was in different font sizes. So I googled a whole sentence and this is what came up. http://stopartscams.blogspot.com/2010/07/scam-email-clark-elster.html

So Mr Gabriel Wolfgang from Adelaide alias Mr Clark Elster from New Jersey and probably many others all use copies of the same mail, they just change the name of the artwork. 

SO ARTISTS : BE WARNED, ITS A SCAM!!! THEY'RE AFTER BOTH YOUR PAINTINGS AND YOUR MONEY!!!!

Crows at low tide

Crows at low tide   watercolour 35 x 46 cm

At low tide these crows were feeding in the shallow water between the sea and the shore. There is a freshwater stream running out here with lots of goodies to eat. I was fascinated by the light as the sun broke through the haze and there was still no horizon to be seen.  Normally I choose very colourful subject matter and enjoy revelling in and rendering the complex colours of nature. By balancing on the edge of exaggeration and by taking closer looks at details, there is no end to the amount of colours to be seen. This watercolour was for once an exception and I found a challenge in painting it using three colours only: Ultramarine blue, Gold ochre and Paynes gray.

Lithographs

"The Egg" lithograph 28 x 22 cm

There are a number of galleries in Sweden, Denmark and Finland that have my works in stock and I am pleased to say that one more has just been added to the list. I am now represented with my lithographs at the renowned gallery of modern art  Galleria Carree in the centre of Kuopio,  Finland. The Gallery represents over a hundred well established, mostly Finnish artists. Finland has a long tradition of fine art printmaking and some of the worlds best graphic artists come from this country. Therefore I am especially honoured that my lithographs also are appreciated there.
You can see some of the work behind the lithograph shown here on this YouTube video. Set the definition to 720p then you can easier read the text and see the details.

Still on my feet.

Standing Goose    watercolour 46 x 35 cm 

OK folks, only 47 geese left to paint! - Only kidding, this is the third and last for the time being.

New York, New York!

I often get flattering e-mails with so called "offers" from galleries. By reading between the lines it's easy to work out that this is just another matter of "Pay to Play" fishing for optimistic artist's money and not a serious gallery entirely devoted to exhibiting good works of art.
Another of these e-mails came the other day in the form of a reminder:

Dear Elizabeth, 

I recently emailed you regarding your artwork and possible promotional / exhibition opportunities at Agora Gallery.

Agora Gallery has been in business since 1984 and is located in the center of the New York City art community, providing exposure and promotion to talented artists, for these services the gallery charges an annual promotional fee. For more information about gallery representation and the services that we provide please visit: http://www.agora-gallery.com/artistinfo/gallery_representation.aspx

I would be happy to answer any preliminary questions you might have. You can reach me at 212-226-4151 ext 207 or chiara@agora-gallery.com

I look forward to your response. 

Best regards,
Chiara Mortaroli
Marketing Assistant / Agora Gallery http://www.Agora-Gallery.com 

By clicking on the gallery's website faqs I found the following:


"If I am accepted what is the cost of the annual promotion and representation?


We offer a few options starting from $3850 which can be paid in six installments of $635 each. Renewal will be offered at the end of the first year at a reduced cost along with a profile in our bi-annual publication ARTisSpectrum Magazine http://www.artisspectrum.com/ at no additional cost. Please note that many of the artists that we represent renew their agreement after the first year"

So I decided to answer them, here is what I wrote:

Dear Chiara
Thank you so much for the genuine interest you have taken in my artwork.
I have been a professional artist since 1967 exhibiting my works internationally in renowned galleries and art museums for four decades.
Therefore I would be happy to accept your offer of paying me $3850 per year for the
honour of representing me and promoting my works in your gallery. Renewal will be offered at the end of the first year at a reduced cost along with a link to my website at no additional cost.
Please note that many of the galleries that represent me renew their agreement after the first year.
I look forward to your response
Best regards
Elizabeth Tyler

You can read more about this widespread business here http://www.artbusiness.com/artist-pay-to-play-list.html

PS. I'll post the answer if I get one.

 

Geese

Canada geese, watercolour 35 x 46 cm 

Three more geese today. Only 36 to go.......
They tend to turn away when I come, ready to run and take off, but stay a while with heads turned so they can keep an eye on me in case I happen to have a gun!

Goose step

Canada Goose watercolour 35 x 46 cm

Every evening a flock of geese lift off from the Sound and fly over our house to settle on the fields and the local golf course. The next morning they are back in the water again. This morning was no exception and I was able to single one out for a painting. It was difficult to get near them, as soon as I moved nearer they all stood up and started walking away. I had to inch my way forward a little at a time, in slow motion. Finally I was so near I could see their feathers ruffling in the wind and the light playing on their backs. I don't think I'll paint the whole flock but perhaps a few more .......

On the beach

Like many other artists I have often found inspiration on the beach. Right now in autumn there is a special atmosphere here with a low lying sun shining through the haze. The colours are warmer and the shadows softer at this time of year, the crowds have gone home and it's possible to sit and paint undisturbed for hours.

Blackberries

I finally finished this watercolour amongst the blackberry bushes. Many hours were spent painting and contemplating,  unwinding and concentrating.  While mixing the colours I tried not to think of anything else than the exact hue of the details in the subject I was observing.  A recent rain shower wetting the surface of the leaves and berries intensified the colours so the whole scene seemed surrealistic. 

Working again

Just wanted to apologise to my faithful followers for the lack of activity on this blog for 4 months. While sailing/painting in Greece in May, my husband was taken seriously ill and all my time and thoughts have been with him. With no time, no inspiration, no concentration and no energy it is, needless to say, impossible to produce anything like a work of art.
As he now is on the road to recovery I can once again turn to my work with renewed eagerness. Four months is the longest period of time I have ever, in my adult life, spent without picking up a brush and, as painting also serves the purpose of being one of the best kinds of therapy you can get, I feel really good about it.
I am making a documentary video about some of my watercolour painting techniques at the same time so the studio is even more cluttered than usual. I hope to be able to show the result soon.