Creating and Producing the Art Creating and Producing the Art The following is a short rendition of how the paintings on this website are produced. I only paint using oils on canvas. 1) I think of a painting in my mind. I presently want to create art with a nude interacting with five to ten levels of abstractions. In a sketchbook, I make a very rough sketch of what I want to create. (See Concept above) The sketch takes less than two or three minutes. 2) Next, I do an image search on the Internet for the things I want in the painting. I am a web designer with an excellent facility with Photoshop and other graphic software. I then create many layers using these images and construct a crude representation of the painting (See Photoshop Sketch above). Mostly I am interested in shape, design and general composition at this stage. For instance, I am interested in the shape of a butterfly, not its design or color. 3) When I finish with step two, I use a large printer to print a black and white copy of the Photoshop sketch in the actual size of the canvas to be created. 4) Next, I tape carbon paper over the canvas, and then tape the printout over that. I mark on the printout with a High-Liter the general areas that I want my apprentice to transfer to the canvas. 5) When the apprentice is finished with her work, I remove the carbon and the printout from the canvas and I begin to add in the details of the painting. I often make a lot of changes and add a lot of detail to the transferred image. In the end, I have what amounts to an elaborate paint-by-numbers, sketched in a hard lead pencil on the canvas. 6) Next, I mix the paint to be applied to the canvas. After mixing the paint, I take a brush or Q-tip and daub the paint onto the areas where I want to apply that color. The apprentice then applies the color. The apprentice does occasionally voice her opinion about the developing painting, and sometimes I incorporate those changes or a modification of those changes. Except in very small areas, paint is not applied on the top of other paint. The canvas is painted the same as a commercial paint-by-numbers, with colors applied side-by-side. 7) When I am creating the sketch of the painting or adding the color, decisions have to be made as the work develops. The things I see in my visualization are not always the way they look when the painting is being actually drawn and painted. During the production, while the apprentice is working, I constantly monitor the developing painting and make changes. Some changes are subtle, but every once in a while the changes are significant. In the twenty-five years that I have been using my current technique, I have never found it necessary to remove paint from a large area and repaint it. I watch the development of the painting too closely for that to happen. 8) After the apprentice goes home each day, I usually paint for about an hour on certain difficult or tricky areas. Sometimes I paint just to keep the painting on schedule. Sometimes I want to see how things are going to develop. Sometimes I paint just to relax for a bit. 9) I do not allow the apprentice to paint the nude figures. Those are done after the rest of the painting is finished and has been allowed to dry for about a week. The final areas to be painted are the white areas. Painting white paint on a white canvas is difficult and causes eyestrain, so it is done after the rest of the paint is dry. 10) See the Final Painting above.