Creating itself is pretty easy honestly. I find something I am inspired by and WHAM, I am nonstop thinking about it until it is created. Happens every time and sometimes the whole thing turns out terribly, and sometimes it's great. Just depends on the muse, the painting/creative Gods or the weather. I'm not sure which.
Painting works like that for me every time. Case in point, the latest series of trout. These aren't 'published' for sale yet but by the end of this, you'll know why.
Last Saturday I went trout fishing (and caught a fish!). But most of the time I was fishing, i was ogling over the riverbank flowers and admiring the variety of pebbles and stones on the bottom of the river. I snapped a few pictures of my favorites and went home. Sometime Sunday it occurred to me that whenever I go trout fishing, I see the same plants. And then I realized the plants that grow by trout streams are some of my favorites and an idea was born.
So Sunday afternoon, I cut our a trout shape out of an old hanging file folder and traced it on a piece of watercolor paper. I then began the incredibly laborious process of drawing out all the detail form on e of the pictures I'd snapped from the riverbank. Then I used some watercolor-resist fluid to highlight the lighter parts and the edges. Then I started painting. And then I tweaked it and under painted it and let it dry and came back and tweaked it some more. In the end, I kept going every night after work all week long and came up with three images I was happy with. And you'd think that's the end of it and I could photo those images and poste them on the site. But nope....
Thursday night I dropped them off to be scanned. The place was super busy so I had to pick them up on my lunch break on Friday Now I have three digital images that still need to be tweaked to perfection for any digital printing I order. The thing that stops me every time is, what do I order? I page through vendors, Print on Demand sites and then I spend a couple of hours weighing the value of each item (bags, hats, shoes, handtowels) and how they might sell.
Then it's back to photoshop to reformat the scans for fine art prints. Then they have to se send to Charles for printing, mats and backer boards and sleeves have to be ordered. And that is all before they even hit the site for sale! So the creating part is so easy! But the production of the final work for sale really isn't!