Red Easel

Publish your own Artist Book!

Now anybody with a home computer can produce a professional, high-quality, hardbound book with a full-color dust jacket for less than $30, thanks to Blurb.com’s revolutionary online book-design software for the Mac and PC.  The concept is wonderful, and since I am a Mac user, that makes it even more enticing.  I can't think of a better way for artists to promote their work and their life as an artist than through a tool such as this.  They make great gifts too!

(Above Right: Ghosts of the Great Highway by Robert Mars)

The books look as wonderful as if a professional publisher had created them without the publisher overhead.  All you do is download the application to your computer and either use their tutorial to work your way thru the creative process, or "wing it" and figure it out on your own.  The good thing is that they have over 70 templates to choose from and each page can be your own creation.  Drag and drop pictures make it easy to create each page.

A Blurb book comes in various sizes - 7x7 (Square), 10x8 (Landscape), 8x10 (Portrait), and 13x11 (Landscape) and your choice of hardcover or softcover with high-quality paper and a nicely bound spine. It is indistinguishable from a mass-printed volume, and its color quality is first-rate.  Once you download the software to your computer, you will have the ability to use all the fonts on your computer making your book a truly personal creative process.

Simplifying Relationships

Richard Baumann relies on two complementary colors to develop his landscapes and interior scenes, applying mixtures of them around the canvas so he can orchestrate the relationship between shapes and values.  As a result, subtle color accents stand out against the balanced composition.

(Right: Interior with Poinsettia, 2006, 20x16 Oil)

The best way to make something important in a painting is often to make changes that subdue everything around it.  That's a simple statement to make, but the concept is one that artists often forget when they are trying to make a flower, a vase, or a cheekbone more significant than it currently appears in a painting.  They are inclined to add more yellow to the color of the flower, thicker highlights on the vase, or more pink to the crest of the cheekbone.  But quite often the best solution is to make everything around that object grayer, softer, or less contrasting.  By adding a complementary color, smoothing an edge, or reducing the difference between values, the competing shapes become less important and the center of interest becomes more obvious. 

Richard Baumann understands and applies that concept as well as almost any contemporary artist.  His interior scenes and landscapes are brilliant examples of how colors, shapes, and values can be simplified so they will have the maximum impact in a painting.  The key to the success of those paintings is that Baumann works with a limited palette of colors that emphasizes the complementary relationship of violet and yellow, red and green, or blue and orange.  For example, Abingdon Square Studio With French Tulips is structured around the relationship of violet and yellow, with most of the sunlit shapes warmed with a cadmium yellow, and the shadows cooled with shades of lavender that represent subtle shifts in the combination of blue and red.  Because the composition is developed with "color/gray" mixtures of the complementary colors, the yellow tulips and blue cloth stand out without the colors or the values being pushed to the extreme.  That is, with most of the canvas covered in subtle mixtures of violet and yellow, the pure yellow and pure blue grab the viewer's attention without much effort.

(Above Left: Abingdon Square Studio With French Tulips, 2007, 14x11 Oil)