DweezelJazz Art Blog

Digital Painting of Gex Town Fountain, France, Using Corel Painter 11

DweezelJazz — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:51:39 +0000

Yesterday I finished another painting for the Gex book. Walking uphill on one of the main streets in Gex, there are wall-to-wall two to three story buildings hugging the sidewalk on either side of the street. So it’s quite unexpected when, on the left, a small square opens up, and it’s possible to see the Jura mountains in the distance and in the square there’s a fountain with running water.

I finally succumbed and tried Corel Painter 11, and this scene is painted with Corel Painter watercolor brushes. It is really a very nice way to paint digitally. I don’t find it easier than painting with normal paint brushes and pots of paint. In fact for the style I’ve used in painting the Gex fountain, I find it’s much more time-consuming to paint digitally than with watercolor on paper.

This is the photo used as reference:

Gex Town Fountain

The ability to experiment without worrying about the cost of materials or if the painting will be ruined, allows much more room to let it flow and try different things. I tend to spend more time going after colors and light that I want to see in the painting.

It’s very nice not to have washing or clearing up afterward. This makes it much easier to start painting even if there is only a short interval of time available for painting. I’m much more inclined to turn on the computer during those times than I am to dig out all the paints and brushes for a painting session.

When painting digitally, I paint pretty much how I would on paper, building up from washes to more detail. I saved backups when I finished an area, so it doesn’t demonstrate much gradual buildup within any given area, but below is a sequence showing the progression in terms of which sections I tackled in what order (click on image to enlarge).

I highly recommend Corel Painter 11 for anyone wanting to paint digitally. It’s potential seems limitless, and it’s very interesting to experiment to see what can be done with it.

Do you like digital artwork, or do you prefer traditionally created artwork? Which do you prefer to see? Which do you prefer to create? Why? I’d love to know your thoughts.

Durability of Egg Tempera Paintings

DweezelJazz — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:03:01 +0000

Egg tempera was a primary method of painting until it was superseded, in the 1500s, by oil painting. Egg tempera paintings are extremely durable, and don’t darken with age as oil paintings do. Evidence of egg tempera’s long-term durability can be seen in ancient paintings we still have today. It was used by ancient Egyptians on sarcophagi and portraits; it was used by the ancient Greeks; all the surviving panel paintings by Michelangelo were painted with egg tempera.

DweezelJazz Art Egg Tempera Gallery Page 1

A few days before Christmas I experimented with my egg tempera paintings to see how durable the method is when painted on paper, a process I’ve described in detail in How To Paint With Egg Tempera. I tested around 7-10 paintings, ranging in creation from several years to 6 months ago.

I found that for any painting over a year old it was possible, without damaging the painting, to:

rub a dry cloth across the painting
wipe the painting with a very heavily, dripping wet cloth

I wouldn’t recommend rubbing hard or wiping the painting with a very wet cloth in general, but it was a great way to find out if the paintings were durable, even if it was a somewhat risky test!

I also pushed my nail on the surface of the paintings and dragged it a centimeter or so, and to my amazement, no paint came off. There was a small indentation on the painting where the nail had pressed hard into the surface, but it was otherwise untouched and the image was unblemished.

I discovered that it isn’t possible to do any of these things, without damaging it, to a painting that is less than six months old. Within six months of completion, it’s very easy to scratch or remove paint from the surface by rubbing it hard.

Luckily, it’s easy enough to fix scratches or blemishes if an accident occurs, by applying more paint, so that no damage or touch up is visible.

This turned out to be a very good thing one time when Jazzy, our african grey, decided she wanted to take a visit to the Maldives beach and finally (after many foiled attempts) managed to land on the painting when I wasn’t looking.

Jasmine took her job seriously as DweezelJazz Art mascot and she evaluated each painting. She clearly had her favorites, because she would sometimes become obsessed with getting close to some of the paintings in particular, the Maldives beach being one of them! She skidded across the surface and created quite a bit of damage only a week after I had finished the painting. Fortunately, I was easily able to fix it and there are no traces of birdie tracks in the sand.

The length of time it takes for an egg tempera painting to become durable will vary depending on environmental conditions. The best approach is to allow a year for the painting to ‘cure’ and set into the durable, long-lived, bright images that egg tempera paintings are renowned for.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

DweezelJazz — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:49:01 +0000

Here we are at the end of another year. This year has gone very quickly!

It has been a year filled with many challenges and also beautiful things.

As nature sheds its leaves, resting and in preparation for a new beginning next year,

I hope that this coming year will be even better, and that we can each, in our own way, make the world a better place.

Thanking all of you who take the time to read this blog and wishing you a very good holiday season and new year.

Snowy Peaks Jura Mountains, France

best wishes,
Nat Wildish, aka DweezelJazz

TMD, A Short Upper Lip, And How I’ve Dealt With Them

DweezelJazz — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 14:23:39 +0000

Productivity is something we’re all interested in. How can we optimise our time so that we can do more, achieve more and have fun while we’re doing it? There are all sorts of ways to become more efficient, and they work well, but sometimes we have a health issue that holds us down. Most everyone has something of this nature at some point in their lives.

This post is about Temporomandibular Joint Disorder and having a short upper lip. Jaw joint problems seem to be fairly common and the symptoms that can arise from jaw misalignment are many. Yet it’s rarely considered by doctors or dentists as being a possible cause for a disconcertingly large array of otherwise unexplained symptoms.

Last February during a routine dental checkup a dentist alerted me to the fact that I had jaw problems. Consequently during this last year I’ve had to learn about it and how to deal with it. I’m hoping that this post might be helpful to others in raising awareness of this condition. I’m not a medical doctor so I can’t advise in a medical capacity.

It turns out that I’ve had jaw problems all my life, with severe symptoms to go along with it. I had braces from the age of 7 until I was 16 or 17 years old. I’ve had regular dental checkups throughout my life and then I had braces reapplied seven years ago for a couple of years to attempt to stop my teeth moving around so much and having teeth pain.

No one ever mentioned the possibility that the jaw could be out of alignment, nor did they ever mention that having a short upper lip could cause problems. I’ve had to live with intense pain and many other side-effects from this most of my life. With each passing year, it was getting harder to keep going and I was beginning to lose hope of ever accomplishing my goals, so I’m very grateful for the timing of the dentist I went to see earlier this year.

I’m sharing here what I’ve learned in the hope that by raising awareness of the difficulties that can arise through simple jaw misalignment, perhaps it can save others from going through years of misery. Below, I briefly describe the effects of TMD, having a short upper lip and how I’ve managed to fix these problems for myself. If you have no interest in this topic, you could stop reading at this point.

Temporomandibular joint disorder – that’s a real mouthful. It’s often abreviated to TMD or TMJ disorder. Whatever you call it, it can be a huge problem. What it boils down to is that for some reason the jaw joint is not working the way it should.

There are many things that can cause the joint to become misaligned: an injury to the joint itself, poor posture, an accident, injury to the spine, the need for orthotics, orthodentistry performed without consideration of jaw alignment with respect to the teeth,…and perhaps some combination of these things. This means that it can be tricky to find out what’s causing the problem.

Symptoms resulting from jaw misalignment can also vary from person to person, both in severity and in the number of symptoms. It can cause havoc with a person’s ability to function, and when the symptoms are significant, it can even result in a person being essentially disabled. If the source of the problem is identified, that person can recover and the symptoms can be eliminated.

A brief description of some of the symptoms that can occur: severe migraine-type headache pretty much most of the time, eye pain and blurred vision, light sensitivity, jaw pain, tooth pain, inability to swallow properly, ear pain without infection, severe constant dizziness, nausea, neck and shoulder muscle strain resulting in inability to move neck, sore throat, difficulty breathing with asthma-like symptoms, inability to sleep for more than a few hours at a time, teeth clenching, teeth grinding,…the list goes on.

It’s much more complicated than this, and this isn’t a technical medical explanation, but if the symptoms are bad enough the scenario can go something like this: to cope with the pain and these symptoms, the body pumps high levels of adrenaline; in the long-term the adrenal glands eventually become fatigued; this affects the production of other hormones in the body and before you know it, you’ve got allergies, digestion problems, the body can’t clear toxins effectively, chemical sensitivity can develop, energy levels hit rock bottom and it’s virtually impossible to exercise.

Then if you go to a doctor, they typically can’t figure out what’s causing the problem because the body is actually healthy, so no test will uncover anything inherently wrong. And there you are at a dead end, always in pain, unable to sleep, not knowing why, but unable to live. Well, that might sound rather grim, but it really is. What does a person do then?

I was super lucky. Last February I went to the dentist for a routine checkup. He took an interest in me because he specialises in TMD and recognised just by looking at me that I could have a jaw problem.

It has been a hard path trying to understand the problem and figure out what to do about it. There were many days when it seemed nothing could successfully be done about it.

I learned where my lower jaw needs to be positioned relative to the upper jaw, in order for me to not experience the TMD symptoms. In my case the upper front teeth and lower front teeth coincide in position. If I bring my teeth together in a normal bite, then the lower jaw is too far back.

Each person has a different jaw alignment position. Usually it coincides with the bite placement of the teeth, which makes things easy. If it doesn’t, then it’s important to find the correct alignment. Of course, it’s possible to have injury inside the jaw joint and then this would need to have proper attention.

The goal is to align the jaw correctly and relax the facial muscles. In my case, I have a further complication in that I have a very short upper lip. There’s an 8 mm gap between my upper and lower lips when they’re at rest. This is a real problem. It means that the facial muscles can never be properly relaxed. Closing the mouth under these circumstances requires constant muscle work, pushing the lower lip up to meet the upper lip. This is like constantly holding your arm out horizontally. Eventually you’d experience difficulties trying to hold that arm out all the time; it could cause cramps in the arm and back muscles and who knows where else. The jaw joint and all of its attendant ligaments and muscles is the most complicated in the body.

This year I have learned not to attempt to close my mouth. But this still isn’t enough in itself. The muscles can’t relax because they have nothing to rest on. This means that the face muscles still contract and tense all the time. In my case, this tensing of the muscles in the face is enough to pull my lower jaw backwards relative to the upper jaw, the face muscles constrict and tighten, resulting in TMD and all its symptoms.

Another complication that can occur is that if the muscle contraction is sufficient to cause nasal constriction then it can become difficult to breathe freely through the nose, especially if the mouth is open. This encourages mouth breathing, which causes the tongue to assume a tensed position, which in turn can cause further tensing of the facial muscles. All of this serves as a feedback loop, one effect aggravating another. If the nose has been broken through injury in the past it’s well worth getting it checked to see if there is a deviated septum or some obstruction that needs correcting.

In my situation, the problem that needed solving was: what to do about having a short upper lip. If orthodentist treatment is started at an early enough age, then the growth of the bone above the front teeth and below the nose can be halted. I believe this is why I was given orthodental treatment at such an early age, but we moved country every couple of years and maybe something got lost in the treatment along the way.

As an adult, it’s possible to operate to shorten that bone, but there’s controversy as to how well this works. I’ve chosen not to take that route.

I found something else that works. I had taken up playing the trumpet a few years ago, and when I asked my dentist if it was ok for me to play it, he encouraged me to do so, saying it might help to strengthen the facial muscles. Playing the trumpet regularly through the day really helped remove many of the symptoms to a workable level.

Pulling the upper lip low to play the trumpet caused it to press against the upper gums, even though the trumpet mouthpiece was placed very lightly on my face. The shortness of the lip requires that I really need to pull it down much more than would be necessary with a more normal length upper lip. Eventually this caused discomfort to the gums. I decided to take a break from playing the trumpet to rest them.

Within a week of not playing the trumpet I sank deeply back into the TMD symptoms and had lost the improved productivity that I had maintained for much of this last year. It was a devastating loss.

Soprano Saxophone

Desperate to find another solution so that I could at least function and have a life, I looked at all the other wind instruments I might be able to play, with less need to pull the lower lip down so far. I decided to try the saxophone. It works to control some of the muscle and TMD problems even better than the trumpet did.

In time though, as I lost the strength of the trumpet muscles through not playing the trumpet at all, I discovered that it’s also necessary for me to continue playing the trumpet regularly to maintain what it does for the facial muscles. So now I play both instruments and the result allows me to function well and live an active, normal productive life. I sleep well and have loads of energy. The balance of how much time playing, how often, and which instrument, is something I work out by trial and error for the most beneficial results.

I’ve tried to think of some way to invent something that could be put between my lips to prop them in a similar manner to having the lips contact with one another like they would in a normal mouth. The complications of how to shape such an object and how to keep it in position have thwarted me in pursuing it. It would be costly and I don’t have access to a workshop to create such a device. But I think it could solve the problem without the need to play an instrument to help the muscles.

Tenor Saxophone

It’s hard to believe that playing the trumpet and saxophone regularly through the day could reduce the symptoms to nearly nothing, but it does. If I go beyond much more than a couple of hours without playing, I’m soon reminded by the tightening of the facial muscles, jaw pain, a blocked nose and a deep headache for starters. Playing the trumpet and saxophone is an odd solution, and certainly not a perfect solution, but it’s enabling me to live life fully and with energy.

I’ve experienced TMD difficulties all of my life without knowing the cause. Each person will likely have a different set of methods to solve their problem, but if relating my experience here can be of help in some way to you or someone you know, that would be great.

How To Frame Egg Tempera Paintings On Paper Adhered To Glass

DweezelJazz — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:22:22 +0000

I received an email from Juliet, an egg tempera painter, asking a really good question about framing and I thought I’d answer it here. Here’s the question:

“I’ve been using egg tempera for a little while now (for religious icons) and I’m really hooked on the medium. I’ve been casting around for a suitable support for more secular pieces which is less laborious than preparing gesso boards, and your way of adhering paper to glass is really interesting. Do you find you have to frame your glass-mounted pieces afterwards or can they be hung as they are?”

The great thing about egg tempera paintings on paper adhered to glass, is that it allows for many options when it comes to framing. If you’d like to find out how the paper is adhered to glass, and why, the process is described in “How To Paint With Egg Tempera“. I’ve framed egg tempera paintings successfully in the following ways:

Hanging the glass just as it is with the painting on it (the glass used in this case is tempered glass, 4 mm thick).
Framing the painting in a standard frame, in the same manner as an oil painting is framed.

If the glass is tempered the painting can be hung directly on the wall just as it is. The “Maldives Palm” egg tempera painting is hanging on our living room wall. The painting is hung with a fixture attached directly to the glass just like mirrors are often hung. There’s card backing on the back of the glass. You can see the result in the photo below.

A traditional frame could be added around the glass in whatever sizing appeals. The flexibility of how these paintings can be framed leaves options open for a person to find whatever appeals to them. As you can see with the “Aguille du Midi” painting, it’s now possible to add a backing and/or a conventional frame around the painting.

I originally used the same glass that is used conventionally in picture frames; this glass isn’t tempered and is thinner than the tempered glass. I used wheat paste to glue the 300 g/m2 watercolor paper to both sides of the glass in order to strengthen it. As the paintings become larger in size, care does need to be taken because the glass does flex when it’s in larger sizes. However, they are robust and don’t bend if they’re not set down on uneven surfaces.
“Portrait of a Horse” is one of the paintings done on normal glass and it has paper glued on both sides of the glass. It has been propped against the wall on top of a cupboard with no ill effect. It could be framed in a traditional frame right over the edges of the painting with a solid backing to give it support, like the “Purple Flowers” painting shown here:

Another demonstration of the robustness of the paper on normal glass with paper adhered to both sides of the glass is the painting of the “Fisherman’s Bastion“, Budapest, which you can see in the photo is sitting on an easel without a solid support behind it. This painting is 14″ x 18″ (36 x 46 cm), which is fairly large. It has been on display long-term like this and it works just fine.

If you want to hang the glass just as it is, then it’s most definitely best to use tempered glass because this doesn’t flex even at larger sizes. I’ve put a lot of thought and experimentation into determining the best ways to frame the glass to ensure that the painting remains in perfect condition on a rigid surface. If you have any questions or suggestions for other ways to frame the artwork, I’d love to hear from you.

What Does An Artist Need To Know In Today’s Technological World?

DweezelJazz — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:46:29 +0000

This seems to be the time when ebook readers and very small portable computers are starting to really catch on, not to mention all the ways it’s possible to read content on smart phones.

I recently read an article, The End of Book Publishing As We Know It, on Michael Hyatt’s blog. In the article there’s a video showing a slim, portable, color-format reading device Time Inc has developed for magazine content. It allows for audio, video and normal text print content to be accessed very easily all in one place at the touch of a finger.

Time (no pun intended) will tell just how much these new devices and combinations of media will affect the conventional publishing industry, but it is already true that the publishing industry is experiencing tremendous changes.

There are many new opportunities available for the individual in this evolving technical environment. Software applications at relatively low prices have made it possible for individuals to learn how to accomplish things that used to only be possible for experts with very costly equipment. One such area is the ability to print a book using, for example, Adobe InDesign or even one of the applications made freely available by online book printers such as Blurb.

The tricky part that comes with having direct access to performing these highly specialised tasks is that in order to create quality products there’s a great deal for an individual to learn. It’s crucial to assess which facets will be important to forwarding one’s own work. There are a variety of reasons for limiting just how much you intend trying to learn to do:

learning a little of everything results in doing most things in a mediocre manner because there just isn’t enough time to truly develop more than two or three things fully and deeply
time spent on one thing means less time spent on another which could be more important in achieving your goal
you might end up spending much more time than you intended doing something you really don’t enjoy very much

So it’s really important to pick and choose what to learn, finding the balance that allows you to move forward with your goals, but doesn’t drain too much from your primary ambition and passion.

My primary passion is stories. I think I could do without many things, but not stories, and stories with pictures, well, I just think that’s the ultimate. I love movies, but have no interest in being directly involved in the film industry. So I’ve been concentrating on understanding what it is about the visual elements that go into art that make it successfully communicative, and what elements are important to a story to make it really interesting and exciting.

I’m still experimenting with just how my passion will express itself in my art. To try to get closer to this, I’ve been delving more deeply into color theory, composition, technique, and all types of art from fine art to illustration, cartoons, animation — everything I can set eyes on. I’ve experimented with digital painting, and more watercolor and egg tempera painting techniques.

I have also been studying writing, visual storytelling and story-boarding, and am writing a couple of fiction stories to see where they go. For the more practical side of how to communicate the art, and possibly stories, during the last year I have completed courses in all of the Adobe Creative Suite applications. My year’s subscription with Total Training will end on January 1st and so this spurred me to complete the InDesign and Illustrator courses during these last few weeks. I have also studied web design, print design, composition, layout, and a little about typography.

So that’s it for the heavy-duty studying for me, thank goodness! Now I need to develop my artwork so that it expresses my passion – and I’m not quite sure what that is yet in terms of style or subject. I think it might be bound up in expectation, and if I can let that loose, my style should just be there. When I write I have no expectation and my writing style seems to be there just simple and unsophisticated, for better or worse. I haven’t yet reached that with the art.

So here’s to the New Year, bringing new discoveries and challenges. If you have any comments on what you think it’s important to learn in today’s environment, and/or if you have any advice on reaching your own style, I’d love to hear them.