The Marketing Machine, the Uncomfortable Truth, and Getting Back to the Paint
If you’ve been following along here for a bit, you know I’ve spent a good chunk of 2026 throwing myself back into the deep end of re-marketing my art online.
Sweaty Messes and Muddy Brushes: What to Do When Nothing Works
There are days when the paint glides onto the panel like it was meant to be there, when a portrait comes alive with just a few bold strokes and everything feels effortless.
And then... there are the last two weeks.
Why I Blame the 90s for My Weirdly Sized Miniature Art
I’m dipping my toes into the miniature art-for-sale waters, but if you look closely at my tiny paintings, you’ll notice something strange. They aren’t the standard 2.5" x 3.5".
They might be 2.5" x 4". If I’m feeling chaotic, they might be 3" x 3".
There’s a very specific and slightly stubborn reason for that extra half-inch. It all goes back to the dark ages of the internet.
The Golden Rule of the ATC
Way back when—not quite the dawn of Mail Art, but exactly when it started growing exponentially online—I was deep in the Artist Trading Card (ATC) community. (Any old-school internet folks remember Nervousness? Anyone? Bueller?)
It was a rich, vibrant, and vital ecosystem of global creatives. We had exactly one sacred, unshakeable rule: The cards had to be 2.5" x 3.5" and they HAD to be traded. Never sold.
It was entirely about the give and take. The pure freewill and sharing of art.
Enter the ACEO (and the Elder Scoff)
Fast forward to the early Oughts. Someone decided that trading wasn’t enough and wanted to start selling their cards. Thus, the ACEO (Art Cards, Editions and Originals) was born. Same size, but with a price tag.
As ATC elders, we scoffed. How dare they?! It felt like a capitalistic glitch in a beautifully pure system.
Breaking the Rules to Keep the Spirit
Almost thirty years later, that purist instinct still rankles a little bit. To my hands and my brain, 2.5" x 3.5" will always belong to the spirit of the trade.
So, as I begin offering my own miniature portraits for sale, I’m changing the format. By stretching the boundaries to 2.5" x 4", I’m drawing a line between the past and the present. It’s my nod of respect to the old guard.
But make no mistake: whether my cards are traded or sold, every single square inch is still entirely imbued with the love, chaotic energy, and community spirit of those early Mail Art days.
Capturing Liz: Turning a Dark, Moody Photo into Electric Acrylic
The Spark: Choosing the Attitude
When longtime friend and supporter, Liz asked how I would portray her—curious
about the colours I'd choose and the reference photo I’d land on—I knew I
wanted to tackle a piece that was as challenging as it was compelling. I found
myself drawn to a specific photo with an incredible sense of attitude, both in
her facial expression and her posture. The catch? The original image was
incredibly dark and moody. I wanted to see if I could translate that quiet,
heavy atmosphere into something fiercely vibrant, using a bold,
super-saturated palette. Painted in acrylic on paper, this piece became a
journey of balancing intense colour with deep character, and I’m excited to
pull back the curtain and show you exactly how it came together, layer by
layer.
The Foundation: Orange Gesso and the Initial Lines
Because I plan to gift this piece to Liz, logistics actually dictated my
choice of canvas. I stuck to paper to hit that perfect sweet spot—large enough
to fully capture her attitude, but small enough to slip into a mailing
envelope without a massive shipping bill. Is it a bit cheap? Maybe, but a
practical artist is a working artist! These days, everything starts with that
signature orange base layer (gesso first, always). From there, I mapped out
the initial lines. They are incredibly faint and barely visible, but they
provide the perfect guide before the heavy paint comes into play.
The Blueprint: The Four-Colour Underpainting
Giving myself mini-challenges along the way is half the fun of experimenting
or creating for myself. I've often used black and white value maps but I
wanted to try it in colour. Mapping out the value scale in just four distinct
colours (black/darkest shadows, deep red, that bright orange underpainting, and
white highlights) locks in the proportions and features before things get
complex. I used Photopea to reduce the colours on the left, and my rendition
on the right.
Building the Layers: Blocking in the Palette
The next phase is blocking in the colours using a palette of Magenta, Teal
Blue, Lemon Yellow plus Titanium White and Black. Still keeping the strokes
large trying not to get bogged down in small details. Using a larger brush
sure helps!
Note how the cool teals begin to contrast against the warmth of the
underpainting, and how the features start gaining sharp, illustrative
definition by the second phase as I start to refine those shapes.
The Final Touches: Carving Out the Shadows
This final stage is the most crucial: DON'T OVERDO IT! It requires an immense
amount of patience and deliberate forethought before a brush even touches the
paper. My goal is to keep that raw vibrancy and energy fully alive while
simultaneously refining the entire piece. It’s a careful dance of mixing the
exact shade of red, pink, or teal-tinged yellow, and placing it precisely
beside the original stroke so it reads as a cohesive form—never blended out or
muddy. Once the colours are exactly where they need to be, I go in with the
final refinements in dark tones, and lastly, those sudden pops of white that
instantly pull the whole portrait together.
New Work: Finding the Heat in High Contrast
There is a specific kind of summer afternoon where the air is so heavy, you don't just feel the temperature—you SEE it. That blinding, overwhelming sensation of peak summer is exactly what I wanted to capture in my latest piece, "Facing the Heat." This painting is currently on display at the Lunenburg Art Gallery as part of the Sand, Sea and Sky group exhibition.
The Challenge of a Smaller Canvas
If you’ve followed my work for a while, you know I usually love to move across larger surfaces. Working on a much smaller scale at just 8x10 inches was a massive shift in gravity.
When you compress an expressive portrait down to this size, every single movement matters. I wanted to keep the application loose, intuitive, and immediate, but a smaller canvas demands a different level of focus. Every brushstroke had to be made with absolute intention. There was no room to hide a lazy mark or overwork a section—it required a delicate dance between restraint and raw energy.
Radiating Warmth Through White Space
The biggest conceptual hurdle was making a painting feel intensely hot while using a color palette dominated by white.
Usually, we associate heat with heavy, dense blocks of warm tones. Here, I wanted the background to mimic that overexposed, bleached-out quality of a scorching afternoon sun. By keeping the vast majority of the space stark and light, the figure has to carry the full weight of the temperature.
To push the vibrancy even further, I experimented with the shadows. Alongside my usual primary magenta, I introduced a deep, dominant teal for the cooler values. It created a brilliant, vibrating contrast against the blazing yellow and orange underpainting peeking through. The teal shadows don't just ground the figure; they make the surrounding whites feel like they are actively shimmering with heat.
Part of a Shared Horizon
"Facing the Heat" doesn't stand entirely alone. It is part of a thematic trilogy created specifically for the gallery show, sitting alongside two other pieces that explore different facets of our coastal summers—from the relentless gaze of a local beach gull to a vintage-inspired figure wading by the shore. Seeing them lined up on the easel together really emphasized how much fun it was to push the boundaries of scale and color for this series.
See it in Person
If you are in the area, please go check out the Sand, Sea and Sky show at The Lunenburg Art Gallery! Opening is Friday, July 3 from 5pm. I'll be there, come say "Hi!" The show runs until August 1, gallery hours: Wednesday - Sunday from 11am - 4pm.
Squinting Into the Shadows: What a High-Contrast Value Exercise Taught Me About Seeing
Every now and then, it’s incredibly healthy to throw yourself entirely out of your comfort zone. If you’ve been following my work for a while, you know how much I love diving straight into expressive color, rich paintings, and bold, intuitive brushwork. But the other day, I took a lesson that completely stripped away my favorite safety nets—namely color and fine detail—and forced me to focus entirely on one thing: structural value.
The assignment sounded simple on paper, but it turned out to be an incredibly challenging, eye-opening exercise in learning how to truly see.
The Exercise: Stripping It Down to Black and White
The lesson started with a scavenger hunt for multiple reference images. Once I had them, the real challenge began. We were told to scale things way down, tracing the core elements of our references into small, constrained 4"x4" squares. Shrinking the workspace immediately stops you from getting caught up in tiny details; you physically don't have the room for them.
Next came the hard part: finding just the shadow and the light. No mid-tone transitions, no soft blending, no color cues. To do this, I dug out a mismatch of grey markers. I ended up using four distinct tones: a light grey, a medium grey, what I thought was black (but turned out to be more of a deep charcoal dark grey), and an intensely deep, true black.
Using only these markers, I had to block out the shapes of light and shadow. It forces you to look at a face or a scene not as a collection of features, but as a puzzle of interlocking geometric values. You have to squint until the details blur away and only the abstract structure remains.
From Marker to Oil: Expectation vs. Reality
Once the 4"x4" value drawings were complete, the final stage was to use those
exact high-contrast sketches as an exclusive roadmap for a small oil study. In
theory, the value drawings had already made all the hard analytical decisions
- where the form turns, where the deep shadows anchor the piece, and where the
light punches through. The painting process should have been a liberating
exercise in translating that simple map of tone directly into paint. But
theory and practice don't always hang out together in the studio. Instead of
sticking to the brave, abstract blocks of my marker sketches, my muscle memory
took over. I hesitated. I started adjusting. Before I knew it, I was sneaking
those familiar fine details back in, ultimately overworking those poor little
oil studies and muddying the very simplicity I was trying to capture. It turns
out that stepping away from your default setting is a lot harder than it
looks!
The Next Challenge
Even though my first attempt didn't stay as minimalist as I planned, the
exercise itself was a massive wake-up call. I can see the incredible power a
painting has when its underlying architecture of light is rock solid. So, I’m
not throwing in the towel just yet. My next goal is to go back to the easel
and actually force myself to do what the lesson intended: execute a study
strictly guided by the marker map, leaving the tiny details entirely behind.
Sometimes the hardest part of painting isn't what you put on the canvas —it's
what you have the discipline to leave off.
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