I’ve been reporting on the “Painting a Day” phenomenon since well before it was a phenomenon, since my initial 2005 post on Duane Keiser (left); who originated the practice in its commonly understood form of painting one small painting each day and posting it on a blog, usually also offering it for sale.

The demands of the practice frequently encourage artists to paint small still life subjects of objects close at hand, fruit, china, painting supplies and so on, but a number of painters focus more on landscape and painting en plein air, so I’ll concentrate on some of those for this round. These painters usually work a little larger than the daily painters who focus on still life, roughly 8×10″ (20×25cm) instead of 6×8″ (15×20cm).

Though Keiser largely concentrates on still life, he does paint landscape, and I like to mention him in these posts.

Here are some other daily painters who concentrate more on landscape than on still life.

John K. Harrell is a Denver based painter. His subjects include the Colorado countryside, as well as paintings from his travels in the U.S. and Europe. Harrell has a nice economy of notation, in which impressionist handling is used for areas like foliage and textured surfaces where broken color is most effective; but like the American Impressionist painters from the turn of the last century he has not locked himself into rendering everything with short strokes, allowing larger areas of color to predominate when appropriate.

While most daily painters work in oil, Harrell works in acrylic and occasionally pastel. He seems to be using thickened acrylics, though, as they have a feeling of surface texture and brush strokes. Harrell also is a participant in the Daily Impressionist Painters group blog and has a dedicated web site that features his larger and more finished work.

Christopher Greco is a daily painter who paints primarily en plein air. His loose, painterly handling of landscape subjects is particularly effective, I think, in his paintings of small creeks and streams.

He also paints landscapes with structures in them, like houses, barns, garages and storefronts, where his succinct brushwork defines their forms in a series of brief strokes. Greco makes a point of saying that he doesn’t “edit” his work, in that every painting is posted, so that we see his daily progress as he experiments and grows as a painter.

Edward B. Gordon is a painter from Germany and has been practicing the painting a day regimen for longer than most, since November of 2006, and credits Duane Keiser with his impetus to begin the practice. He posts small paintings of a variety of subjects including figures, landscapes and still life.

He has a nicely angular approach to brushwork, laying in individual brush strokes that serve to define a plane. Unfortunately, his posted images are a bit small, leaving me wishing there were lager versions in addition, though he does occasionally post detail images of some of them.

Note: he has some kind of Flash map/comment widget running in his sidebar that my copy of Safari momentarily choked on. Your milage may vary.

George Coll lives in Colorado and his daily paintings are of the mountainous landscape surrounding him. Coll treks from his two acre property out into the back country with with 2 pack llamas carrying his supplies (now that’s different). His location paintings are often in the muted tones of daylight softened by the shadows of the mountains, accented with brilliant light on distant peaks.

He also paints figures and town scenes and his blog will occasionally feature images of his larger works, done in the studio from his location sketches. Coll also has a web site that showcases his larger finished work.

Candy Barr is a painter from Vermont who frequently paints landscapes. Her paintings are sometimes very straightforward in their color palette and at other times “pushed” into brighter, almost expressionistic color.

She also has a web site on which you will find her larger pantings. Of particular interest are her “floaters“, images of nude figures floating in water.

Stephen Magsig is a Detroit painter whose blog, Postcards from Detroit, is a “Painting a Day” style painting diary inspired by pioneering daily painters Duane Keiser and Juilan Merrow-Smith.

Magsig focuses on urban landscape, and most of his paintings are of urban scenes in Detroit and New York, where he is a part-time resident. He studied at Ferris State College and the College for Creative Studies, but considers himself essentially self taught as a painter.

His large scale gallery paintings are almost photo-realist in approach, but his smaller, more immediate works have a wonderfully painterly quality that works particularly well for his subject matter of industrial scenes, abandoned buildings, empty houses and architectural details.

There is something particularly appealing about the way Magsig applies his paint in quick, brusque strokes that seem to have a texture just right for the rough surfaces of the neglected buildings and weathered industrial structures he revels in portraying.

I particularly enjoy his Hopperesque portraits of abandoned houses, sometimes boarded up, surrounded by weeds, and surprisingly rich in color. I also like his beautiful industrial nocturnes, reminiscent of Whistler’s atmospheric images of the River Thames. You’ll also see echoes of Charles Sheeler’s industrial geometry in Magsig’s angular compositions of smokestacks, factory walls, bridges and gantries.

When browsing through his site, you’ll find more variation as you go back in time, with occasional forays into still life and traditional landscape. Be sure to click on the blog images to get to the large versions in which you can see the texture and application of the paint.

I initially came cross Oregon born, California based painter Don Gray by way of his daily painting blog Daily Art West, in which he posts his small paintings of varied subjects, sometimes following the model of small indoor still life subjects common to the “painting a day” practice, but more often of outdoor scenes, frequently painted en plein air.

Following links from the blog, I found some of his more finished gallery work and discovered that he is a muralist.

Gray paints his small paintings in both oil and watercolor. His 30 years of painting have taken him through much of the Pacific Northwest; and he has applied his direct realist style to a variety of landscapes, both intimate and grand in scale. He has also developed the figurative work that features more prominently in his murals, which most often are of historical subjects.

Gray has in recent years experimented with moving away from realism in his contemporary work.

Perhaps because I don’t have much personal experience with the western mountains, I connect most readily with his smaller scale landscapes of woods, small fields and creeks. In particular his small plein air paintings of these subjects have a feeling of immediacy and deftness of execution that I find particularly appealing.

Looking back through his blog posts, which are plentiful as one would expect from the painting a day regimen, is a fascinating journey through varied countryside, as well as another sort of journey through the artist’s interest in certain subjects. These fascinations often result in small series — of his brushes, of pillows on a love seat, or the current small series of fruit wrapped in clear plastic bags.

His landscapes show a freedom of subject choice that indicates he is not reliant on the “picturesque”. Gray has developed an enviable ability to see painting worthy subjects in almost anything on which his eye alights.

Sherry De Ghelder is a painter in the St. Louis area who has taken up the “painting a day” regimen, painting small postcard size paintings of everyday objects such as fruit, vegetables, candy, small toys, and so on.

De Ghelder’s latest series, which I came across by accident while browsing, is something else again.

She decided for the month of January to place her small subjects on her husband’s Marvel Comics super-hero cards when painting them. These cards have black and white images on them, and as a background for her small painted objects, are strikingly graphic.

In the image above, for example, the almost van Gogh-like roughness of the rendering of the toy shoe makes a wonderful contrast with the painted interpretation of the black ink lines on which it sits.

The subject of the black and white cards seems almost irrelevant. De Ghelder usually crops her composition in such a way that the black and white lines of the card image appear more as abstracted graphic elements than recognizable images, and she could probably as easily have made them up herself.

I was just struck by the wonderful juxtaposition of the stark graphic lines and the colorful painted images rendered on top of them.

The result has the power of both the black and white graphic shapes and the painterly realism and color of her subjects, giving the combination a unique feeling that is quite different from either of those approaches alone.

Personally, I think she’s on to something.

Suppose you’re meeting an art director and you want to leave behind printed samples of your work.

You could print out some pages on your home printer and try to assemble them in an office store report cover, or you could go down to Kinkos and have them print and bind it in some kind of corporate report package; you could give them a disk and hope they take the trouble to view it, or you could just give up and beg them to bookmark your web site.

Imagine the difference, though, if instead of a printed pamphlet, you leave a full-color, glossy, hardbound book of your work, complete with dust jacket.

Or…

Suppose you’ve been asked to present a gallery with some photographs of your work as a form of initial contact. Some galleries still asks specifically for slides, but if it’s up to you would you rather give them a pile of photos, computer print-outs, bound or not, or… a book of your paintings that looks like you just picked it up off the shelf at Barnes and Noble?

Or…

Perhaps you’d like to collect your work in a book and offer it for sale on your web site, something I know many artists would love to do, but consider out of reach. (I can see all of the “painting a day” artists sitting up and taking notice.)

Or…

Maybe you’d just like to have your paintings, or even a collection of your travel photos, arranged as a book that you can give to friends and family as gifts.

“But, Charley,” you say, looking at your computer screen with a quizzical and/or bemused expression, “this all sounds great, but I don’t recall inheriting a fortune lately, I can’t afford to pay thousands of dollars to have a book printed. Have you gone daft?”

“Why, no,” I say, “well, maybe…, but that doesn’t alter the fact that one-off printing of individual books has become practical and, in fact, is now remarkably affordable and easy.”

It used to be that printing a full-color book required and outlay of thousands for an extensive print run, making such things impractical unless you could attract the attention of a publisher willing to invest in publishing your book to a wide audience. In printing the general rule has always been that the more copies you printed, the cheaper each copy became, and you had to print a relatively high number to get the price point per copy to be remotely viable, particularly in color. The idea of printing a single copy of a full-color book was absurd.

Printing technology, though still slow to change by the standards of digital media, has made some amazing progress while we were busy being dazzled by the internet. New on-demand printing techniques, utilizing sophisticated ink-jet technology, have finally made the low print run and one-off printing of full color books, even hard-bound books, practical.

You can now put together an 8″x10″ (20×25 cm) 40 page full-color hard-bound book and print one copy for as little as $30, soft-cover for $20!

There are several companies now that offer inexpensive short-run or one-off on-demand printing using this new technology; the one I have experience with, and can recommend almost without reservation, is Blurb.

In the case of Blurb, the technology is the HP Indigo 5000 digital press. Some of you may be familiar with Apple’s iPhoto books, which use the same principle but are much more expensive.

You don’t have to be a graphic designer, or know how to use Quark or InDesign, to put a book together for printing by Blurb. You download Booksmart, their book template software for Mac or Windows (I used the Mac version) into which you load your digital images and arrange them in a choice of book sizes and page template variations. The software is well thought out and very easy for someone with no design experience to use. Graphics professionals will actually find it a bit restrictive, but it’s not aimed at us, and as a work-around you can use your own typography and layout in the form of full-page images. The process even allows you to do full bleeds (images that extend to the edges of the page) at no additional cost.

It’s suggested you do a test print from your home printer, and then upload the book to your Blurb account through the Booksmart software. In 7-10 working days (1-2 weeks) the UPS driver will plop your shiny new securely packaged book into your eager hands.

You can print in several sizes, from 7×7 inches (18×18cm), starting at $13 for up to 40 pages paperback, to their “coffee-table book” at 13×11 inches (33×28cm), which is hardcover only starting at $55.

Most importantly you will blown away by the quality of the results (providing, of course that you are careful in the preparation of the book on your end). The books look fantastic, the printing and color are absolutely beautiful and look remarkably professional. They may be printed on-demand, but these are bookstore quality books that you would be proud to offer for sale on your web site.

For more information, I’ll refer you to a more extensive review by Kevin Kelly, a reviewer whose opinion I trust and from whom I learned about Blurb, who also reviews another on-demand printing service, Lulu.

I don’t have direct experience with Lulu, but I mention it because Kelly does and because Blurb is about printing in color, it’s not the ideal solution for black and white printing, which should be much cheaper than even the remarkably inexpensive color of Blurb books. Lulu may be of particular interest to those printing black and white comics.

When preparing a book for Blurb printing, be sure to heed Kelly’s advice about blurred images, take care to photograph your work sharply and as professionally as possible. (I list a few resources about photographing artwork at the end of this post.)

Once your book is complete (and you’re seen at least one copy of the finished article to make sure that it’s the way you want it), you can order more, at a discount if it’s over 10 copies. You can also offer the book for sale through the Blurb bookstore.

When I was investigating Blurb, I didn’t have enough artwork in a state that I wanted to print in a book yet, so as a test I put together a book of photographs I took in Venice and published a 20 page Blurb book. You can see it here in the Blurb bookstore. Below the image of the book cover is a link where you can download a PDF preview of the first 15 pages that will give you some idea of the Booksmart template layouts, at least as I have used them.

The image above shows that book in the Booksmart software on screen, the actual delivered book open to the same page and the book cover (inset).

If you’re at all curious about Blurb, you can create a small Blurb book for as little as $13 (plus shipping) just to check out the process. A friend of mine just did that and was delighted and amazed with the results.

So what are you waiting for? You’re only a couple of weeks away from being a published!

Jason Waskey is an Seattle based artist who has applied his talents in several areas of artistic endeavor. He has been in turns a freelance illustrator, art director for a newspaper and a comic book company, instructor for the Art Institute of Seattle, comic book artist, painter and gallery artist; and is currently an art director for The Giant Software Company That Must Not Be Named.

Somehow, his finds time to paint almost every day and post small paintings on his blog, much in keeping with the manner of many “painting a day” painters. These small works are of small common objects and have that un-fussed with quality of quickly done paintings that are an immediate response to the subject. He also writes a bit about the subject and the painting process and occasionally about other topics as well. Of particular interest on his blog are the posts linked in the right-hand column under the heading of “On Inspiration and Influence”.

In addition to the small works featured on the blog, you can see some of his more finished gallery works in the gallery section of his web site. These are often of figures in interiors. They are open, painterly and, to my eye, seem inspired by “American impressionists” like Sargent, Hassem and Tarbell as well as the more obvious influence of Hopper. His interiors are sometimes of airy, window-lit spaces and at other times of the subdued low contrast tones of indirect interior lighting.

There is a pop-up gallery of “small paintings for sale“, reflecting the smaller works featured on the blog.

There is also a “what’s on the easel now” section that is not updated nearly as frequently as the blog, but features a number of step-by-step progressions through the painting process, as well as notes on the creation of larger works.

In addition there is a “photos” section that includes photos of his palette and working setup; as well as a “links” section with links to artists, blogs and other resources of interest.

He also has one of those excellent sketchbook posts in which real sketchbook pages (possibly Moleskine) are posted as they look, rather than as carefully selected sketches out of context. (I can’t give you direct links to the web site sections because the site in in frames.)

Waskey is represented by the dezart one gallery in Palm Springs.

Here is an interesting study in contrasts within the work of an artist that, to my eye, seems to be reaping the rewards of taking on the practice of daily painting, in terms of growth as an artist and noticeable increase in skill and confidence.

Michael Naples has been doing portraits in graphite for ten years. In August of last year he started a regimen of a drawing a day, and initiated a corresponding blog. A month later, you can see apparent marked increase in control and technique between two drawings of a similar subject (August & September).

A few days later he has switched from a drawing a day to a painting a day and, as you scroll up the page (the blog is entirely displayed on one page, convenient once it’s loaded, but perhaps problematic as it grows), you can see a progression into stronger contrasts, bolder colors and more confident paint handling.

His daily paintings quickly become much more interesting, for me at least, than his more practiced portrait drawings. Though his portrait drawings are certainly competently rendered, they seem to be restrained the same limitations that often characterize portraits drawn from photographs: a vague softness, limited tonal range, and lack of defining line or strong chiaroscuro to give them the “punch” that a life drawing might have, uninhibited by the requirement of pleasing the subject with the result.

Naples’ current paintings from life, however, exhibit the opposite characteristics: bold compositions, bright energetic color, strong value contrasts and an overall confidence and enthusiasm that almost seem like the work of a different artist.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, interpreting an artist’s development from a series of blog posts, but I think you can see him progress through stages of experimentation, different approaches in brush handling, palette and composition and see a real progression in terms of his control of color, composition, value and command of the materials.

In Naples’ most recent work he has tended to frame simple subjects with warm, dark backgrounds, pushing them forward and modeling them with bold, lively brushstrokes and rich colors. Many of them exhibit a maturity as a painter that belie the short time since he undertook the daily painting routine to “get back into the groove of painting”.

You will also find his work on a daily painters group site, Daily Paintworks, which appears to be one of the stronger of the recent daily painter community sites. The site itself is new to me, but it seems I’ve written posts on all but two of the 12 current members.

Abbey Ryan is a Philadelphia based painter, designer and illustrator who studied here in Pennsylvania as well as in New York and Massachusetts. She has a portfolio site, in which she showcases her illustration and design work, as well as her gallery art.

The latter is non-figurative, with arrangements of soft edged shapes that give impressions of movement and suggestions of morphing forms. They are arranged with a designer’s eye for the importance of negative space and rendered with a muted palette and delicate applications of texture.

Given my predilection for representational work, I find more interest in her painting blog, Ryan Studio, in which she has recently taken on the “painting-a-day” discipline, and paints crisp, painterly oils of simple subjects like fruit, vegetables, candy and other immediately available subjects that are often the chosen subjects for daily painters.

Ryan posts large images of her small paintings that are actually large enough to get a good feeling for the surface of the painting and the way the paint is applied, something I wish more artists would do when presenting their work online, both for the benefit of those just looking, and for the benefit of those looking to buy, who must make a judgement about the appeal of a painting from an online image.

Ryan’s strengths show when she arranges slightly more complex compositions and tackles textured and patterned surfaces in addition to her primary subject.

Ryan appears to be fairly young, and her willingness to take on the painting-a-day regimen, and her confidence in working with more complex elements within it, make me think it will be interesting to watch the course of her development as a painter.

[Link and suggestion courtesy of Jason Waskey]

I know very little about this artist, not even whether “M Collier” is male or female. What little biographical information there is simply mentions that the artist was born in San Francisco, earned a degree in Art History from California State University, has “lived in and traveled to many places”, and now resides in Southern California.

M Collier is represented online by a painting blog called Paintings from the Point, as well as by inclusion in the DailyPainters.com site and membership in the Daily Painters Guild. I mentioned Collier briefly in my post last spring about Painting a Day Blogs (Round 6), The Daily Painters Guild. I don’t see any sign of a dedicated portfolio site or mention of gallery representation.

Collier’s paintings appear refined and accomplished, with an emphasis on chiaroscuro and the effects of light as it plays across the the gleaming faces of curved china dishes, around reflective silver surfaces, and through transparent vessels holding water, and usually, flowers.

There is a fascination with light, and the color of flowers and vegetables, but in particular I think, with the way these smooth curved objects sashay the light beams around their forms in graceful arcs and ellipses. If you look at the shapes of the areas of color, soft, muted blue-grays and delicate slivers of highlights, you’ll find those curves and arcs repeated again and again. This is particularly evident in the repeated theme of stacks of teacups, in which your eye follows a swinging line back and forth as it travels down the canvas.

Most of these works are painted in oil on board at a small scale, often 6×6″ (15×15cm), and take on the (I think) difficult challenge of handling square compositions. They are predominantly of small, intimate subjects, treated with a clear realist approach. The compositions usually employ a dark, very neutral background, against which brightest highlights in the foreground objects sometimes go to pure white. Within that range, color is carefully controlled and at times seems almost like an accent; with the red of cherries or the greens and reds of vegetables appearing almost like an extra element on top of a monochromatic final.

When viewing the works in Collier’s blog, there is no “Previous Posts” navigation, so use the dated links in the right hand column. You can also find a thumbnail-gallery display on the DailyPainters.com site that makes it easier to get an overview.

Qiang Huang (pronounced Chong Wong) participates in the online Daily Painters Art Gallery and is listed on Jeff Hayes’ Painting a Day Squidoo lens, along with others involved in the increasingly popular practice of “painting a day”. He is also a member of a group called Plein Air Austin, which is dedicated to outdoor alla prima painting in Austin, Texas and the surrounding area.

Huang’s daily painting blog is largely dedicated to still life paintings. Where many daily painters will opt for small, single objects as the subject for these small daily studies, Huang works with more traditional still life arrangements of multiple objects.

His paintings feature bright, bold colors, a highly painterly approach with lots of visible brushstrokes and physical presence of the paint texture, and compositions with strong value contrasts.

Value is often underestimated as a quality in painting but Huang has made it a major component of his work. As an experiment, I converted a couple of his images to grayscale in Photoshop, effectively discarding the color information and leaving the image only in grays, and they read very well.

Huang has a demo video on the blog, from a demonstration he gave for the Plein Air Austin group, in which he worked on this still-life.

The demo is instructive even though it is set to an instrumental version of the Rascals’ Groovin’ rather than having an explanatory voice over. You can see, at least in this case, that he establishes his values with a low-chroma sketch before going in with his brighter colors.

The paintings on his blog are linked to nice big reproductions, close to or even larger on screen than original size; which I think is an excellent practice for a painter who is selling work directly online.

In addition to his blog, Huang also has a web site, with galleries of his more finished still life paintings, landscapes and portraits. His landscapes and portraits often use the illustrative approach of letting the edges of the image stay as rough, broad brush strokes that fade off into unpainted areas.