I like Christmastime but I’m happy to be getting our lives back in order. I spent many hours this morning cleaning our house out and packing away boxes in the garage – celebrating Boxing Day in its most literal sense. I got a lot of great art-related presents this year and I can’t wait to get back to painting regularly. Along with taking a (short) break from the site, I just found it really hard to escape to my art room over the past few days. So, just like my (unintended) little Christmas break from the gym, I took some time away from art to recharge.

When we last left off, I had just started working on a portrait of my husband and Baby Teelo on a TTC streetcar. I love the reference photo for this painting, and I had been kind of mulling over this work for so long. Usually that kind of mental prep goes hand-in-hand with an easy painting experience aka, it just painted itself! I definitely wasn’t feeling like this was an easy painting after my first evening working on this. I think because I’m painting my husband, there’s just a higher bar for getting it right, I haven’t done a human portrait in a long time, but also the painting is small compared to the sizes I’ve been working with lately. This is definitely something to keep in mind for future works. I went back to this painting over and over for a few days and kept tweaking my husband’s portrait.

I grew so frustrated that I finally decided to let the painting really dry for a few days so that I could check the portrait proportions with a transparency overtop. This is such a valuable check. It let me identify the issues I wasn’t seeing but which were causing my neck to cramp. The painting was dry enough that I slipped a piece of Saral transfer paper under the transparency and drew some white lines overtop the painting to guide my next layer of paint. I worked for a few hours today (seriously, where does the time go???) and I finished up with this:

There were no huge mistakes, but many little things that were all off, and all amounting to a really awkward portrait. Once I carefully worked through the changes, I instantly felt a lot more positive about the whole thing. I will let the portrait dry to touch and check it one more time with the transparency for accuracy.

And a little closer:

The next big challenge will be nailing puppy Teelo which I will get to tomorrow night 🙂 Hopefully. I am loving the details in this painting. It may sound strange but I really love the colours and reflections and shadows on the backs of the seats behind my husband. And I think it’s going to be so much fun to finish Teelo’s face and move on to the city view through the streetcar windows. I’d like to replicate the view from the photo. A nostalgic picture of my husband, Teelo, and College St in Toronto. I’m really looking forward to getting back to it tomorrow night.

One of my big Christmas surprises was a Neewer 18″ Dimmable light and light-stand kit from my husband. I had wished for a simple cell phone “holder” for filming. I had imagined some sort of clamp that attaches to a tabletop with a bendy arm so that I could position my phone how I like for filming (“bendy” – really technical, I know :)). My husband just went totally above and beyond and got me this amazing set-up – I still have to figure out how everything works but there is even a Bluetooth-enabled remote that will let me take hands-free pics with my phone mounted on the light-stand. Not only that, the light has drastically improved the quality of light in the art room but it’s LED so it doesn’t heat up.

This gift is such a game changer. I feel like I’m going to really level up in terms of video production and just being able to see what I’m doing with proper lighting at night. It’s amazing. He set it up for me last night right away. I’m so lucky to have his unwavering support.

Some other Christmas art presents:

More Canson Artboards! I’ve written before about how impressed I was with the Canson Mixed Media Artboards that I bought on a whim during my October trip to Curry’s Art Store. I love pen and watercolour and the mixed media boards have been a dream for this. They don’t warp, they are a beautiful, clean white. I have some sketches from a cute Clicquot series I was working on last winter. They were intended to be finished in pen and ink and I think the hot-press illustration board will be perfect.

I also got these watercolour artboards and I’m really interested to see how they work in comparison with my Arches watercolour block. They are textured, but less so than the Arches, so I think they will be better for using mixed media.

I’m also really excited to see how the watercolour artboards work with my new Winsor & Newton Designers Gouache set! I have white and black gouache that I use routinely with my watercolour paints but I’m really curious to try gouache on its own. I’m kind of intending to approach it similarly to how I use acrylic and oil… so stay tuned for that. Thank you to my generous in-laws for these sweet gifts.

Finally, I know I’ve mentioned before my love of black Sharpie markers so this was a really exciting gift for me – ALL the Sharpies!!

Lastly, totally unrelated to art but exciting for my daily life – My husband also surprised me with these Salomon winter running shoes:

They are the Salomon Speedspike CS. Another big surprise for me. Do NOT wear these in the house!!! You will damage your floors. They have little metal spikes all over the soles that dig right into the ground.

The story behind this gift is that I never risk running outside with the dogs when there is any ice on the ground. Even if it’s pretty clear it’s just too risky to run with three dogs in case there’s black ice that I can’t see – I had a bad fall with Teelo trail-running one year which included a trip to the ER and ever since then I’ve had some strict safety rules. I just don’t see the point of running without my sweet dogs – it’s just not the same – so my winter running really takes a hit every year. I took these shoes out for a test-run with the dogs this afternoon and they were amazing. We covered 4 km and the sidewalks were half-covered with ice and a light dusting of snow, perfect spikey-shoe conditions.

The dogs were a little alarmed for the first block or so because it sounded like I was wearing tap shoes. Once they got over that it was an awesome run – these shoes are like super sidewalk Velcro. I was still careful but oh my goodness – ice storms won’t get me down this winter! These will be my go-to dog running and walking shoes for the winter, as long as the snow isn’t deep.

It’s been a hectic few days. Looking forward to some time with my little family this weekend and getting back to my art work. I feel like I have so many ideas for painting and writing it’s hard to keep up right now. With the new year coming up I’ve been reflecting on where I want to take my art and evachristensenart.com in 2019. Stay tuned for regular posts once again. And of course, thank you so much for reading.