Author Archives: asheys3

Sunday Sketches

I had been struggling to find time to put time aside for art. Being a full-time mom as well as a painting instructor for Pinot’s Palette, it was a struggle finding time and motivation to work on art.

In the spring, I read a book called Resisting Happiness by Matthew Kelly. I read a chapter a day during Lent and it inspired me to make the time to create. One of the things Kelly suggested in the book was to keep something called a Mass Journal. The idea is that you bring a journal to mass every Sunday and write down one thing that connects to you during the service. This could be a line from a reading, a song, or something the priest says during the homily.

I liked the idea, but instead of using a journal I chose to do sketches. A friend had gifted me a set of artist tiles, like the kind used for zentangles, so I decided to use these to write and draw my mass reflections. Because the artist tile cards are small, they fit nicely in a small pouch with a couple of pens and pencils I bring along. I listen during mass, write down my connection, and illustrate my reflection.

I like doing these Sunday sketches because it not only because it makes me dedicate time every week to sketching, but it also has helped me connect during church and learn more about myself as well.

Getting Cinderella Ready For the Ball

It had been a long time since I had been able to create any new artwork, so I made it a priority in April to create a piece of artwork just for fun and all for me. My daughter loves Disney movies and we watch many together. It’s fun to re-watch many of the films that inspired me to become an artist.

One film that I loved re-watching was Cinderella. The artwork and animation are beautiful. I’m especially in love with the colors and style. Cinderella’s dress transformation might just be true animated magic. I love many other adaptations as well including, but not limited to, the Rodger’s and Hammerstein Cinderella TV musicals (1965 and 1997), EverAfter, and Gail Carson Levine’s young adult novel Ella Enchanted.

I decided to create my interpretation of Cinderella’s dress transformation. In addition to wanting to work for Disney, I also dreamed of being a children’s book illustrator and wanted to replicate these loves and ambitions through my art. I’m currently reading a book on children’s book illustration (a dream is to someday create my own illustrated book) and wanted to make a finished piece that might look like the page from a book. I hoped to create a sense of scene and story in one image as well as experimenting a little bit with style and technique.

My inspirations were all of the film versions of Cinderella I love and the artwork of Disney concept artist Mary Blair who helped create the look of the animated Cinderella.

I started with a really REALLY rough thumbnail using the ArtRage app on my phone. I had a vision, and wanted to quickly block it out with some colors I thought might work together. Afterwards, I created a pencil sketch, transferred the sketch to some smooth watercolor paper and began to block in the background using wet-on-wet watercolors and placing saran wrap over the paint while it was still wet. This technique create a fun texture, one of my favorite ways to play with backgrounds in my pieces.

I had envisioned a roughly painted tulle skirt created using thick gouache, but when I struggled to get the effect I was looking for, I had to switch tactics. I took a gamble of the dress by using a combination of wet-on-wet technique with lots and lots of salt to create a crystallized effect. Thankfully, it turned out even more magical than I had anticipated. When I started adding fine details on top of the dress, it really came to life and had a dimensional quality to it that I loved.

Cinderella’s face and the pumpkin were painted using gouache. I wanted to include the pumpkin and mice to foretell what else Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother would transform to get her ready for the ball. I had originally started with a solid black silhouette for the pumpkin and mice, but felt it looked too flat when compared to all of the textures used in the background. The addition of blue and purple gouache helped tie it into the rest of the piece.

I am very happy with how this piece turned out. I hope to create a Snow White themed piece in the near future.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes video depicting my process on Cinderella:

When you’re too busy to do art…

The last couple of months have been very busy months for me. November and December were filled with lots of holiday commissions for Christmas presents and weddings. Even though I didn’t have the time to work on getting my Etsy shop ready for the holidays and working on some holiday marketing and prep, I ended up having my busiest holiday sales season anyway. The popular items of the season were Colorado themed jewelry.

My favorite commission of the season, would have to be this pencil portrait I drew for a friend of the family. It was a present for his mother in-law depicting her dancing with her daughter, his bride.

Because of being busy with lots of commissions as well as my regular job working at Pinot’s and raising a toddler, I haven’t had time to work on my own artwork. I was able to do a fun watercolor and gouache painting at the very beginning of the year of my interpretation of Kim from the movie Edward Scissorhands. Tim Burton’s art and movies always connected with me growing up (though honestly, what middle/high schooler didn’t connect to his characters). I remember watching Edward Scissorhands at a friend’s house at a sleepover and feeling completely wrecked emotionally at the end of the film. It spoke to feelings I was experiencing being somewhat of a misfit high school student. This movie, as well as his other films, inspired a lot of the kinds of emotionally driven art I was creating during that stage of my life and I wanted to create a piece that honored that.

Since then, all of my artwork has been work related. It’s good to be busy and earning money, but it’s been a little bit creatively draining. However, yesterday I was able to create some art for fun. My friend Conni, has been hosting “Inspiration” art gatherings. These gatherings are opportunities to be surrounded by other artists and art lovers and exercise our creativity. One of the things I miss most about college studio art is being surrounded by people who are constantly creating. These Inspiration get togethers are a way to put aside time to be creative, but in a fun and relaxed environment. It also provides people an opportunity to try new things and get to know new people.

At our get together in February, we had a “Wine Women and Watercolors” night where we had a flower still life and all played with different watercolors and water media while drinking wine. Yesterday, we drove to a natural area and hiked. We took pictures and sketched and then drove back to Conni’s house and created artwork based off of our sketches and photos using the media of our choice.

Conni took this photo showing the view of the natural area we hiked around for our March “Inspiration” get together.

I had no clue what I was going to create, especially since I don’t normally create art that’s nature inspired, so I walked around with my camera phone looking for inspiration. I took a couple photos of some dried up plants by a lake and sketched them in my multimedia sketchbook. I masked off my drawing with a new masking fluid pen I got and filled in each negative space with a variety of bright colors instead of the gloomy grays and blues of the actual sky. After I finished with watercolors, I removed the masking fluid, used pencil to re-draw the plants, and added some light gel pen branches to add more layers.

It was a lot of fun just to be sitting down and creating a project “just because” and reinforced the importance of creating my own art. Sometimes I don’t work in my studio because I don’t have an idea for a project of importance. I forget that the little sketches and doodles are just as important to do because art is just as much about the process as it is the final product.

Wedding Gift Portraits

It’s been awhile since I have posted, so I wanted to share some portraits that I painted as wedding gift commissions. Each is done in watercolor and gouache.

New Colorado Jewelry

I’m excited to announce my new Colorado jewelry pieces! I now offer square pendant necklaces and beautiful quick release cuff bracelets featuring Colorado Columbines and our Colorado Flag. Simply click on a photo to be brought to the item in my Etsy shop:

Need more Colorado love? There’s also Colorado greeting cards available in my shop:

A Peek in the New Sketchbook

When I was in middle and high school, I used to draw in my sketchbook daily. My sketchbook went with me everywhere I went. It was a good icebreaker for meeting new friends, a good way to pass the time during class (don’t worry, I was a good student 98% of the time), and a good way to practice and create. I was constantly making up my own characters and stories. My sketchbook was almost like a diary or creative journal.

Sometime during college, I stopped keeping sketchbooks. Yes, we often had to have a designated sketchbook for each individual art course we took, but I didn’t really use them in the same way that I had before.

For my birthday, I asked my husband to get me a sketchbook for my birthday. He got me two different mixed media sketchbooks. The one I started to use is a Strathmore multimedia sketchbook that has a cover similar to a Moleskin sketchbook. I love it and have been trying to get back into the habit of working on art in the studio every night. Having a nice sketchbook definitely helps!

A couple months ago, and before I got my new sketchbook, I started trying to branch out and try new things with watercolor. For some reason, having a wash of color helps me figure out what I want to draw. Doing art this way kind of reminds me of doing a charcoal or conte drawing on toned paper.

I recently have been trying to get more portrait practice in. I do a lot of portraits in my personal work as well as commissions, so I wanted to make sure that I was staying in practice. I decided to get back into gouache and add it on top of watercolor washes to see what would happen. This was my first practice:

I remember finishing it and thinking, “This was a ‘practice’ piece? It’s better than some of the finished pieces I’ve done lately.” But maybe that’s the thing… When you work in a sketchbook, you take more chances and you allow yourself to experiment more. I think sometimes the pressure gets to you when you’re trying to do a finished “final” piece of art.

So right now, I’m going to continue sketching and practicing. Hopefully more of my sketches will turn out as nice as this piece. I’m hoping that over time, my new theme and style will start to show itself in my sketchbook pages.

Pianos About Town – The Finished Results

I finished my piano for the Fort Collins Pianos About Town project last week. I put in a full day on Sunday, July 12th and wrapped up the small details on Monday, July 13th. The piano was approved and has since been moved to a new location. I’ve heard that it’s currently sitting at “Jazz Alley” by the Food Co-op and the Mitchell building. I plan on dropping by sometime to take a picture of it in the new spot!

There was a big sense of accomplishment when the last details were added as well as a big wave of relief. I had painted a four wall mural in my daughter’s nursery before this piano project and I feel like this piano took a lot more work. Part of it is you have to fill up all of the space on the piano, which takes a long time, but I think the other part is interacting with the public and working with the elements while you paint. The best part about getting the piano finished was knowing that I would be able to have my weekends back to spend time with my husband and daughter. I had missed them so much during the three weeks of this project.

I feel very thankful to have been selected by the city of Fort Collins to share my art with the public! It was definitely a worthwhile experience – one I hope to have the opportunity to do again in the future.

New Product Photography

I had been planning on doing new product photography for the greeting cards in my Etsy shop to bring them up to the next level. It’s taken a while to do because I’ve been busy working my other jobs, but I finally finished the first phase of pictures.

Each greeting card was placed on a large piece of decorative and elegant scrapbook paper. I used silk flowers, feathers, jewelry, and other small items to help draw out the colors in the artwork or hint at the theme of the piece. I still want to take more pictures featuring the cards in frames since the cards can also be framed as prints.

A side-by-side comparison of the old product shots and the new.

Here’s a screen shot of my Etsy shop homepage. I had updated about half of the greeting cards at the time of this picture, and it amazes me how much more my eye is drawn to the cards that have the new product photography shots. There’s a new level of sophistication and professionalism that wasn’t quite there before:

Here’s a couple more examples of the new and improved greeting card pictures:

Pianos About Town – Week 2

I was excited to return back to work on my piano for the Pianos About Town project. Last weekend, I had blocked out all of the colors for the sky, grass and tree, painted all of the red and yellow stripes, and I had sketched out all of the animals (first in chalk and then in pencil). It took longer than I had anticipated, so I was looking forward to making some real progress this week. There were a couple of things that I did differently this week:

I showed up early

I almost finished this side. I ran out of steam and decided to “call it a day” and return to it later with fresh eyes.

The first week, I was stopping by the Oak Street Plaza around 11:30am everyday to work on the piano. They were long days and I felt pretty drained upon finishing, so I decided to head in earlier in the morning. I made it a habit to arrive between 8-9am mostly to beat the heat, but also to enjoy some quiet work time before Old Town wakes up.

I’m happy to say, that I made a lot of progress and finished all of the goals I set for myself this weekend: finish painting the piano front, top, and sides (well, I almost finished painting BOTH sides).

You can get a lot of work out of the way when you don’t have to work around piano players. People love playing the pianos, and I love listening to them play. There are a lot of talented musicians in our community, young and old. I wanted to get the front and top of the piano finished so that way they could enjoy playing the piano without me getting in the way of their music making.

I thought of my work as “ministry”

I was talking to my friend, Emily, who is a wonderful role model to me. She had stopped by with her daughter to visit me paint last week, and later on we got a chance to reconnect with our daughters at the park. I was telling her the progress on my piano and how some days were slow because people would stop and talk to me, sometimes disrupting my work flow. I was talking about how hard it was to listen and work at the same time. She was saying that I could think of my work as its own form of ministry.

There are a lot of people in Fort Collins, and when you’re painting on a regular basis, you meet the “regulars” who stop by the plaza a lot. You also meet people who need someone to talk to and tell their story to. This week, I talked to a homeless man while I worked for probably close to 2 hrs. He was a kind gentleman, and I felt glad that I could be a listening ear for him. He kept asking, “Am I bothering you?” to which I would reply, “No. You can talk and I’ll listen, but I have to be working on my art at the same time.”

I also talked to a little girl for about 2 hrs on Sunday. We talked about her love of books, why we thought the berries on the nearby tree were ripe or not, watercolors, bicycling, sewing, and how it takes a long time to paint a piano. She probably spent a good 40 minutes peeling off the dried paint from my palette and she loved it. I hope I can raise my daughter as inquisitive and thoughtful as her.

I thought about how lucky I am to be an artist

In the plaza, there are a lot of kids and they’ll ask me, “Are you an artist?” and I’ll say, “Yes, I am. It’s the best job in the world. I basically get paid to color.” I say it with a little bit of jest, but I’m thankful that I actually do get to be privileged enough to be bestowed that job title. I had always known I wanted to be an artist growing up, and now that I’m a “grown up” I’ve realized that you’re not always given your dream job, so I definitely feel blessed that I’m offered opportunities to teach, create and sell artwork as a career. I try not to take it for granted and I have to work hard to find opportunities to continue to make art my career.

My co-worker and friend, Jenna, once said that “art isn’t just a career, it’s a lifestyle” and it’s so soooo true. In church, we’re always talking about time and talent – basically, we are all blessed with different gifts and we need to find ways to share them with others. I am thankful to God that He blessed me with a love and talent for art and that He has helped me find opportunities, like the Pianos About Town project, to share that gift with the community. I’m thankful to my husband, who is also an artist, who supports my art making.

I’m looking forward to finishing this piano next weekend so that the community has an inspiring piano to make beautiful music on.

5 Things You Learn When Painting a Piano

This summer, I was lucky to have my concept art selected so that I could participate in the city of Fort Collins Pianos About Town program. The Pianos About Town program gives local artists a chance to paint a piano in public. The finished pianos are rotated around Fort Collins as a way to create opportunities for musical spontaneity. The people of Fort Collins love looking at the different designs as well as playing on the pianos. I had always wanted to have the opportunity to have my artwork featured on a piano and wanted to come up with a design that would be family friendly and visually attractive.

A couple of months ago, I created a piano concept design that I submitted to the city. My design was selected and this last week was the first of three weeks that I am given to paint my piano.

The front and top design of the piano.

The back and side designs of my piano.

I’ve experienced a lot during my first five days being a piano artist and I thought I would share with you what I have learned.

1. The pianos are new

My piano before I started to paint it.

The first thing that people ask you when you’re working on the Pianos About Town project is why you’re painting over a piano that has already been painted. Like most of the community, I had been under the impression that the pianos were re-painted every season. However, I learned in all five seasons that none of the pianos have needed to be painted over. Citizens donate new (actually “used”) pianos for the artists to paint. I was given a piano that had been sanded and a bucket of approved paint primer. The new pianos are all painted in the same spot (in the Oak Street Plaza by the fountains), so people get confused when they see a new artist painting a different design on a piano. Multiple times a day, I tell the community that all of the pianos from past seasons are either floating around the city or in storage at the Mitchell building.

2. It takes a long time to paint

I’ve had experience painting murals on the walls of people’s homes. The walls of my daughter’s nursery are filled with a landscape of children’s book characters, so I more or less thought painting a piano would be the same. I work quickly, so I assumed I would be over halfway done by the end of my fifth day.

The artist is required to paint every surface of the piano, so that would include the underside of the keyboard cover, the underside of the piano, and many other nooks and crannies that you wouldn’t necessarily think of. The entire piano needed to be covered with white primer before I was able to start adding the base colors for my sky, grass, and yellow/red stripes. The stripes were the most tedious part of the painting process because they needed to be clean and crisp. I had used painter’s tape to block out the stripes, but the paint bled through the tape. That meant I had to carefully paint the remaining stripes by hand to guarantee crisp lines. Which leads me to the next thing I learned….

3. People freak out when they see masking tape

The masked off stripes before “the incident.”

The end of the first day, I spent an hour measuring and putting down painter’s tape across the keyboard cover of the piano. I covered the piano with the tarp that comes with it, and left for the day. When I returned the next morning, the tarp was off and almost all of the tape had been torn off because someone had opened up the cover and played the piano. It took every ounce of restraint I had not to scream and throw my paint on the ground. Thankfully, there was enough tape still on the piano that I was able to re-tape the lines without re-measuring. It took me less than an hour to redo, but it was still time that I could have been painting the actual stripes.

As I was re-taping the piano, a concerned lady walked up to me and asked why I was taping the piano shut. She was worried that I was keeping citizens from playing the piano. I assured her that I was there to paint the piano to make it eye-catching for the community and that the tape was meant to mask off the stripes for my design. After that, I tried to paint the lines as quickly as possible. Because of the bleeding through the tape, I had to paint almost all of the lines by hand which took me a little more than two hours to do. Note to self: in the future, don’t incorporate stripes into your design.

4. You meet a lot of people

One of the things I have always loved about Fort Collins is how nice the people are here. Everyone is very friendly and you meet a lot of these friendly citizens when you work on a piano. When I was still in the priming stages of the piano, I would have people non-ironically telling me, “It’s looking good so far!” (Really? It’s just white!) Most of the people who come up and talk to me are residents and are familiar with the program, but I’ve had a lot of vacationers talk to me. I had no idea how many tourists visit Fort Collins.

During the fifth day, I had to work around two piano players. The first gentleman was playing original songs and blues/swing covers trying to sell CDs. We talked a little about his music and he told me that he plays at all of the pianos that are “about town.” When he was wrapping up, one of his friends came over and spent the next 1.5 hrs of my shift telling me his life story while I attempted to listen and work at the same time. Near the end of my shift, another gentleman asked to play the piano, sang opera and played “Rhapsody in Blue.” It’s neat meeting so many different people and now I understand why they give you three weeks to paint the piano – you’re talking to the community just about as much as you are actually painting the piano!

5. I miss my daughter

My mother-in-law and Holly stopped by the visit me on my second day.

I’m an artist, but I’m also a mom. I would call myself a stay-at-home mom, but I’m blessed with the opportunity to work on my own art at home as well as work as an art instructor at Pinot’s Palette. Like my job at Pinot’s Palette, the Pianos About Town job has been flexible, but I had to ask my in-laws to help watch my daughter, Holly, for the first five days. My days are always focused around my baby girl, so it was strange not to have her around. I’m very fortunate to have awesome in-laws (who live in town) who offer to help babysit. I knew Holly was in good hands, but I definitely missed her. When I would get home, I would feel tired from the day’s work and she would be off to bed shortly after. Two of the days I worked on the piano were also days that I taught night classes at Pinot’s Palette, so I really missed out on spending time with her. I’m looking forward to being back to our normal routine.

So, even though I’ve made a lot of progress, I still have a long way to go. The base colors and almost all of the stripes are finished (I ran out of yellow paint, so I still need to paint the stripes on the inside of the piano keyboard cover). I painted in the base color of the tree and drew out all of the animals throughout the piano. I used chalk to figure out their placement before outlining the chalk with pencil. They will be ready to fill in with paint during my next shift.

I’m planning on resuming my progress on Friday, July 3rd. The plan is to arrive early in the morning so that I will hopefully have a couple of quiet hours working before the plaza becomes bustling with people. I’ll keep you posted on my progress!

Amy Heyse

Catholic Artist