Someone's gotta do it!!

And that someone is me! I teach at Sacramento City College, I conduct art workshops, I do my one fine art (at least I think it's fine). I also do commercial painting like you see here. This is one of a stream of steady food paintings I do for a graphic design firm that has many food related clients ranging from wineries, distilleries, and canned foods. They like my "illustrated" look for the food labels they design. At $300 per "spot Illustration", I'm affordable. Most every job is different. This allows me the opportunity to render a panoply of different things...good practice for an artist and the income stream ain't bad! These three paintings will be used to print two different cooking broth labels. The chicken broth label will show the chicken plate with the ladle overlapping it a bit. The beef broth label, through the magic of the computer, will have the chicken taken off the plate and the beef placed on it. Same ladle but via said computer, the golden chick broth will be re-colored to represent beef broth. I suppose a computer artist could do these illustrations, but either they haven't found a good one or none don't compete with my prices and reliability...who knows! The other painting is for a label on a bottle of rum called "Hammock Bay Rum" I'm hoping to get a sample with my illustration on it. Sometimes painting becomes thirsty work don'tcha know?!.

I "Stole" Her

If I need any type of photo reference, I use Flickr.com as my main source. It is a cournocopia of wonderful photos on subjects from A to Z. Many photos are copyright images and can't even be dragged to your desktop, but many are not. I only use these as reference for art studies and would never reproduce them for commercial use. Any who...here is a watercolor study I just completed for a watercolor portrait workshop I'm offering in May. It is from a striking photo I pulled off of Flickr. Should give a credit to the photographer, but unfortunately, I did not note the name. I often will do these portraits in vibrant colors, but this one is more manageable for my workshop participants, and I like the limited palette. By the way, the highlights in her hair were done with colored conte crayon. I sometimes finish off my watercolors this way.

Sunrise Over The Capitol

This is a watercolor of the Calif. state capitol in the morning light. The sky was "painted with little atomizer bottles of red, yellow and blue with these three colors mixing on the paper (140lb. cold press watercolor paper). The foreground foliage was painted very wet on dry with the colors blending while I held the paper in a vertical position. When all was dry, watercolor and whitl opaque paints were splattered and flung on top.

Cloudy with chance of showers

Painting clouds is an exercise in subtlety...subtle color and value changes, and clouds are not white and grey. This was a class demo in acrylic on stretched canvas (12'X17"). Acrylic paint does not blend nearly as easily as oil (acrylic paint dries within about 5 to 12 minutes!). I used flat brushes and a VERY LIGHT touch for color glazing and value blending. As California goes into summer so too does the it go into a drought. No wonder that every time it rains, I thoroughly enjoy the event!

Writing On The Body Of A Queen - fini

The dipstick (or is it diptych?) I have been working on to help raise funds for The Northern California Dance Conservatory is finished. Note that Marie Antoinette's fan has "real" jewels on it worth almost $8. My goal with this double acrylic was to reflect the glitzh and bling of Marie's world before those nasty, nasty revolutionaries put the kabasch on it all. I also wanted to reflect the female movement of this beautifully choreographed dance. Ninety percent of this painting was executed (no pun intended} with various sizes of flat brushes. The design on the dancer's dresses were painted using paper doilies and an air brush.

The Bastards Lost!

Several months ago, I wrote that I was commissioned in 2000 by the NBA Sacramento Kings to paint and design a poster to be printed and mailed to all the season ticket holders at the end of the season. A good friend and I spent three days at about three hours per day numbering and signing 7,500 prints in the executive office suite at Arco Arena here in Sacramento. In other words, my good buddy, Paul, picked up the first print from the stack and wrote 1/7,500 down in the left corner. He handed it to me, and i scrawled my signature next to the numbering. We finally finished at 7,5000/7,5000 followed by my 7,500th signature scrawl. Yes!...I added another fee for the numbering and signing! But I digress. The 2000/2001 season was the Sacramento Kings best and most awesome season! They were the darlings of the sports media world and the fans! The following years and up to the present, the team has not played very well, because each and every season, they choose a new artist to do the end-of-the-season poster! If they had only stuck with yours truly!! As I mentioned several months ago, they hired me back this season to paint Chris Webber and Vladi Divac for two poster to celebrate the retirement of their jerseys at Arco Arena. They both played on the dream team of 2000-2001! I wrote that the team was going to turn around, because I was back on duty!!! But noooo!!!!!!!...they just ended the season as one of the worst teams of the NBA! So much for the Lobenberg art mojo!!!! The bearded geezer on the right is me at the Divac jersey hanging game. The Kings played against the New Orleans Hornets. They lost by two points when a Hornet player sunk a three pointer in the last two seconds!!...bastards!

Kissing The Sky

Painting sunflowers was an assignment a few weeks ago in the acrylic/oil class I teach. This was a demo painting starting out with very simple paper cut out-like color shapes on a Mars Black painted stretched canvas. You can see some of the black peeking out. I think this helps to bump up the brightness of the colors. After I was finished with the paper cut outs, the sunflowers were taking on the look of a paint by numbers painting. But as I progressed to refine by softening edges and blending colors, that look was dampened. I am always challenged with big blue skies, but I like this one...praise be Brilliant Blue by Utrecht and Cobalt Teal by Liquitex plus some warm colors towards the right lower corner. I like growing the tall 12 footer sunflowers but the stubbies are kinda cool also.

Writing On The Body Of A Queen

This painting is my interpretation of a new ballet titled "Writing on the body of a queen" ( recently choreographed by Jennifer Bradford, director of the Northern Calif. Dance Conservatory) that in turn was inspired by the late, "great" Marie Antoinette. It's a diptych on two stretched canvases measuring 12"X24" per canvas for an overall size of 24 1/2"X24". It's about 50% completed...a work in progress. More later.