Pastel Workshop. The Elements of Art Book.

Medium Blog: Pastel Workshop. See Differently. Understanding and Using The Elements of Art.

Books I Read This Year

Casey Klahn (2007), Casey Klahn, Colorist American Landscapes, Pastel Works.
Self Published.

Hmmnn. What to say about this one? I certainly agreed with the author 99.999% of the time, and I really dug the art images. The book is 11" x 8.5" and features 25 artworks, both full color pastels and drawings, as well as candids and petite essays on my art philosophy and process. I think I still have about 6 -7 of these sitting in the studio. If you contact me, I will ship a book/books to you for $30.00 each plus tax and postage.

When I do another one this year, I'll try to have more pages and images, as I felt that it was a little thin. I will probably repeat the spiffy essays with art approach, and I hope to add some actual blog rips as well.

To Continue...

Urgent Help Needed - Book Pricing

Rip from my book

The book is about ready to go, although the customer service at MyPublisher is telling me to wait while they figure out why I had a mis-print on the spine of the "proof". I'm going to push it forward anyway, since there have been so many changes to the book, it will "send" as a new book with a new file name, anyway.

I need your help,. dear readers, on pricing. Maybe a few of you will wind up buying a copy, too. Here's your chance to "open source" solve the pricing issues I have.

The "wholesale" to me is going to be significant, even with the standard discounts that MyPub offers, and with grouped shipping. I had originally had a retail in mind of @ $49 for the 8.75" x 11.25" linen hardcover. The catch comes when I realize that it will be competing in the broader book market, but it only has 29 pages. It features 35 images, 32 of which are in color, and essays about my art process. Prints of my Colorist American Landscapes are offered nowhere else. And, at that price, I will be earning in the single digits. Call it cheap advertising!

I looked up Wolf Kahn (my sage) on Amazon, and his (much longer) hard bounds are retailed at @ $45, but of course they are older now and get discounts to about $30. My venue, though, will be the art fair and not the bookstore or Amazon. I think I'm going to be OK with the mid forties price, especially with the perceived demand that comes with standing in front of the artist in his booth and in the presence of an installation of originals. The package has "whollop", to coin a phrase.

In the fully steamed department, I see Amazon sellers trying to unload their Wolf Kahn opening catalogs for greater than $100! Don't get me wrong, it's a free market, and it is perfectly legal. But please! Those are ( I know in a commercial setting) given free as a token for attending the gallery during his shows. Is no one polite, anymore? Well, I'll get off of my soap box, now, especially since my English is deteriorating...

Your opinions on my price? Could it be a little more? Or, is $45 too much and they will just languish, in your opinion?

BTW, the text in the rip above is new for the book, and I share it here:

"The fact that one usually begins with drawing is already academic. We start with color," Mark Rothko.

The great Abstract Expressionist, Mark Rothko, has taught us a great deal about color. Don't begin with a subject at all, but rather a color composition. He found it imperative to kill the subject completely, but my approach is to devalue it by repetition.

I have been influenced by the idea that, instead of using a three hue palette such as red, blue and yellow, an artist may arbitrarily choose to function using a two color base. Say, red and blue.

Here's an analogy to help you understand my two-color theory. When I was heavily into mountain climbing, we approached ski-waxing theory by simple numbers. There was the three wax system: Red, Blue and Violet, perhaps - each color was for a different snow temperature. Some wanted five waxes for the ever-changing Cascade Mountain's temperature conditions. I wound up devolving to a two-wax system: Red and Blue Extra. Similarly, the artist may wish to see two halves of the color wheel, and think of the blue side of yellow and the red side of yellow. This is as opposed to seeing three "rote" and separate hues, and instead viewing something like a continuum. The advantages may be that the artist will focus more on the split of each hue, and get a better use of every color (even yellow!).

By the same token, consider a two color system where we have a red-influenced blue and a red-starved blue.

In my current series of blue-centric works, I am discovering the freedom of the one-color composition! How much can I learn about the enduring color blue? What is the importance of line to the one-color work? The same question may be asked of form. The pastel: "Blue Wandering" is in many ways a break through for me. I have added more cobalts, and found new avenues to drive abstract shapes down. The "exploding" violet trunk would never have worked in a multi-colored palette.

Am I traveling two roads at once-a monochromatic one and a limited color-theory one? Perhaps that's what artistic license was invented for.

Book Report

The book has arrived via Fed Ex and I was surprised at the quality! See my "book report" at the Endless Sumer Art Fair blog.

Atonement and Automatism

Atonement
Soft Pastel
7" x 5"
Casey Klahn

Many cuts from this blog made it in my new book/portfolio. Here's a new quote, though:

Gesture and intuition combine in my abstract art. Intuition, not intention. Color choices are simply not derived from nature, but from internal sources.

"Automatism" is an old term that could be applied here. Drawing for drawing's sake, without idea or content. Color has it's own intrinsic purposes and reasons - ideas of it's own.

Am I controlled by my medium? Perhaps, but no more than most.

What are my ideas? To express color as the dominant element in the formal qualities in painting. Color can be the strongest element, and I think that in this age we have yet to plumb it's complete depths. No content; no meaning. No subject, other than red and blue. Yellow, green...these are my subjects.

Automatism.

Book Project Update

The book project is on the front burner. Better not say: "burner". That reminds me too much that today will be another 100 degree Farenheit scorcher. Where I come from originally, it's much like I think the Northern U.K. is: the "foggy land" of myth. 70 degrees was considered hot, and we still put on our coats to go outside. We didn't have seasonal clothing, given that we only had one season!

I reviewed Lulu, MyPublisher and Blurb, but found some areas wanting. Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools has this great comparison of POD outfits. Here is a UK blog that did an extensive test of 3 brands of photo book. Mavie did a wedding book review between MyPub and Blurb. She agrees that Blurb's pages are too lightweight. WeddingBee has a user that loves her MP book. I felt Specifically, the business plan of Lulu is nice, but their printer is the same quality as my in-home printer (dry ink). They receive high marks from the world of writers seeking to publish and distribute their novel or whatever text-centric vehicle they choose. Hello, Twenty-First Century!

I did find this tidbit: you may browse for creative commons images to use on this page at Lulu.

Another issue is formatting. The various POD, one-off (meaning that you may print one book at a time), services have you download a simple program with templates. You drag and drop your jpegs, and the formatting is easy-cheesey.

Me being a fan of monkey-business, and always trying to re-invent the wheel, have decided that the next time I do a layout, I want to do it all myself. This method is also necessary for me when I produce low-quantity layouts such as a brochure for my packet or for my booth. I'll cover self layout issues that I have researched, or suffered personally, in a future post.

Blurb and MyPub use a much better printer, the HP Indigo 5000, which is a 7 color liquid ink offset look digital printer. Much better choice for image-centric books. Also costs more than Lulu, and for good reason, I think.

I am, so far, pursuing MyPublisher for a few reasons. The day I went to "pull the trigger" on laying out my book, I couldn't get the Blurb download to work, had trouble with my member log-in, and also didn't like the paper stock in my example book from Blurb. The photos "bled-through" from the reverse side of each page! They use an 80 lbs. paper, apparently, but the example book they sent me seemed lighter than that.

So, I spent all day Sunday early morning to late night formatting my pages for MyPub, and am just in the clean-up stages. Especially trying is my slide list. Unlike some complainers on the web, I found their interface pretty easy. All text pages, partial text pages, 1-6 images per page, no problems. Photo uploads - easy.

I also have a reader in Valhalla, NY (MP's address). The MYPublisher product, if I understand it correctly, is printed in the USA. The UK people who tested it on their blog, referenced above, did receive theirs from the US.

I cannot find any information on self-pricing or marketing a MyPublisher book, so I am currently in limbo on this. I resist the low quality paper and reverse bleed-through of Blurb, which also won't even download to my computer, so they're a non-starter, anyway.

Now, I am in the throws of Googling everything and anything on MyPublisher, etc. The research continues...

Review of findings:

1. Lulu uses dry ink printing, poor for images
2. Those that use the HP Indigo 500 are best, like Blurb or MyPublisher
3. Complaints exist for all of these publishers, with a wide variance of satisfaction. There is ample evidence of people happy with the quality of MyPub's pages and photo quality.
4. Most will use these services for "vanity" publishing, which means essentially not for profit purposes
5. MyPublisher is not savvy to the for-profit guy like an artist trying to publish a portfolio style book
   
6. A few bad eggs come out of the basket from time to time, such as page cuts off, photos not present or flipped, even wrong address delivery

Addendum: I pulled the trigger and ordered an 8.5" x 11" tome that will be 22 pages and contain about the same number of images. The hardbound volume, with shipping, comes in at just short of Fifty dollars (I opted for 2 day air/UPS). If I re-order after I approve this draft, then shipping will be cheaper for a multiple purchase. I think the final book may still come out to retail too expensively, at whatever plus @ $40. Hopefully, the margin on softbound can make up for that. On pins and needles, folks...

Rough Drafts

My soon to be (self) published book is in it's rough draft. The subject, so far, is about intuitive process and color choices. I am spending so much time with the writing and formatting of the book, and with preparation for my first art fair of the summer, that I am going to put a "hold" on the historic Abstract Expressionist posting.

Don't worry, I'll still be reading and studying up on the famous artists. Have you found that the busier you get, the more important it becomes to still read?

The first "rough' text:

Red Veiled Forest
14" x 19", Pastel
Casey Klahn

Red curtained forests are a staple of my images created in the early part of the decade beginning in 2000. Don't assign too much meaning to the red in them; to me it's just an attractive color! The challenge comes in trying to make a believable landscape-one that reads as a landscape without too much thought on the part of the viewer-without pushing the red subject over the top. Will it hold up? Will it be a balanced composition?

Repetition is an old and venerable artist's tool. How much can this idea yield? Anything good enough for a successful painting must also have more than one story to tell. For me, the red theme has also provided a unifying element to the works made in these few years. And the lessons learned about controlling intense pigments have been invaluable.

Red Veiled Forest is an image that no matter how I tried, I just could not repeat. Some of the techniques used are understandable in formal terms. A partial sky, a few areas of paper peeking through to provide a depth to an otherwise (intentionally) flat composition. Alternating bands of temperature "compliments". These things are repeatable.

But it turned out that I couldn't even get close to the structure or composition again with any amount of success. Nothing else looked right. So balanced, so deep and full of red, so mysterious. I decided that it should remain in my own collection, thinking that some day I would understand the key to the mystery of how to make a painting like this.