Lisa McShane Art

South Fork Skagit, 2018. Oil on Linen. 30" x 48" Studio talk: I've spent some time lately trying to figure out how to do a better job photographing paintings in my studio. I expect this is a puzzle that plagues other artists too. So I googled and found a lot of advice, then followed some good advice. Here's a few tips on Artwork Archive's blog. Here's the great advice from artist Marc Dalessio that I followed  with a few changes. I ordered lights on Amazon (about $75), but haven't ordered the polarizing sheets for them. Instead I place the lights on the same plane as the painting. I already used Lightroom to edit photos and so I ordered the x-rite i1 + the color checker. That seems to really help a lot. I've been using my Olympus OMD-EM5 with the magical Panasonic 25mm lens. I had a cheap tripod that I bought years ago at Costco. My next upgrade will be to a full frame camera (Nikon D750) and a short telephoto prime lens for more detail.

Over the past couple of years I've looked at and played with a lot of computer programs for keeping track of artwork. Here are past blog posts on the subject: Art Inventory Systems, here's what I've tried and then this Update on Art Inventory Systems Alyson Stanfield has also written about this riveting subject on her great blog here . I come to these systems with built-in bias. I prefer a FileMaker based system to an Access based system because I think it's a more powerful and smoother software to use. I'd worked for a nonprofit that used Filemaker and it's what I know. I also prefer a system without goofy graphics. I'm an artist. I care how things look. If I open up software every couple of days I would like it to be clean and simple and not ugly. But computers evolve and the next direction is to the cloud. That is a system where software doesn't live on your computer but you access it via the internet. I operate on 3 devices: my iMac in my ...

Closeup of Rattlesnake and the River with burnt sienna ground. T his winter I read in several sources that Sanford Gifford first stained his surface with burnt sienna.  I first read about this on Philip Koch's great blog  in a post titled Bold Power Hiding in Subtle Colors . And of course the next day an artist friend, James Lourie , forwarded me the link to Philip's post knowing how I'd love it! Loriann Signori wrote about it on her blog here , saying " Sanford Gifford stained his white canvas with burnt sienna, drew in white chalk and then glazed more rapidly. He would paint non-stop from sunrise to sunset when he began the color part of his painting. He had already worked out his color idea in his oil sketches. Gifford kept working and blending his glazed layers while they were wet. " David Dunlop, in a blog post titled Luminous Skies has a great, brief explanation along with images. (BTW: his blog is great, deep with information and his own wo...

In progress - Rattlesnake dusk. This past few weeks I've been trying something out on Facebook: posting an image each day of the progress of a painting. I started with just the sketch and at the end of my day in the studio I pull out my camera and tripod and snap a shot. You can join the crazy fun by clicking here and then 'liking' my page on Facebook. As it turns out, it really doesn't influence my process. I don't paint differently because I take a photo each day. But I don't know that it's really all that interesting for those who follow me on Facebook. The nature of Facebook is that an image pops up randomly in their feed and they may see one every few days but without context unless they click on it. At the end I think I'll take each image and put them together in a quick slideshow. What I'd like is a 'flipbook' or 'time lapse' approach to quickly see the changes take place. If you know what program will work to make th...

Alders, Cherry Point: sketches, underpainting and first layers On Christmas Day my family took a hike to Cherry Point, along the coast in Whatcom County. Cherry Point is a beautiful area just north of the refineries. There are still herring beds, purple starfish on the beach and heron and eagles roost in the trees on the bluff. Several years ago the local land trust asked for my help in approaching the landowner to allow it to be purchased for a park. I did, the landowner was kind enough to agree and the area is now a small county park that provides access to the shoreline. It was sunny on Christmas and the winter shadows were just right. This is the start of a painting based on that day. You can see the sketch of this and several other paintings. Then the underpainting, and now the start of the layers. The sky may be too dark and I'll go back over that a couple of times to lighten it. I have several other works in progress from Christmas Day. It was a beautiful hike.

Sketches and first steps for Similkameen Valley Tonalism - this may not be the best painting to show you what I'm doing in the Tonalism Class but for me, this one is instructive. On the bottom you can see the sketch for this and several other paintings. Then next, the first attempt at the underpainting. There wasn't enought information so I added more. The one on the top is after 2 coats of glazing. I don't know yet how many layers this one will have. Given that I want the foreground to be fairly dark and the hills in the back sunlit from the early morning sun, it may take awhile.

Sketches and Underpainting for 3 trees This weekend the weather was fantastic. Really amazing. I've been wanting to capture good shots of the Chuckanuts in the fog for awhile and this weekend was able to do that. When I got home I took the photos and rearranged and simplified through sketching. You can see the sketches of 3 Trees above. I then took the sketches and created an underpainting. I may add more information to the underpainting before I start to glaze it but this is where it's at right now.