Urban Naturals series expands, becomes another series

I am calling this series Rovinato, Italian for "ruined". I wanted it to be Lenti Rovinato, which should mean "ruined lens", but in talking with some of my artist friends, that seemed a bit much for a name.

It started with the same idea as Urban Naturals, mixing photos of urban texture with close-up photography of items from nature.

In early March, I thought some of the bare trees around my hometown might look nice with this treatment, and that expanded to include the old historic buildings in downtown Wilmington.

One of the great things for me about this series is that it opens up my schedule for photography. With my scenic photography, I am usually looking for a time of day with good light and a good sky. With the Rovinato series, I can shoot on otherwise bad days.

So far the series is 24+ images, available in 5"x5", 8"x8" and 12"x12". 16"x16" will be available when this series goes live on ImageKind.

For now, these are available on my Etsy shop.

More new work....

I have a few new strains of work now. The gallery being relatively settled, I am now getting the chance to work quite a bit. Here's a little Spaceman that I now have for sale on Etsy.

He's kinda 50s, I reckon. I have been trying to find some subject matter that fits this style, and have a few more in the works.

Squeezing in a little art....

Amidst all the gallery goings-on, I managed to get a little work done on what I am calling my Woodland Critter Collection. I am really enjoying trying to keep these simple and to try to capture what makes each "Critter" look like it does.

There will be more to come, but for now you can view these 3 at my Etsy shop.

Pics of the progress

The space we are moving the gallery into was a Christmas shop, with mostly green walls and red carpet. We started by painting over the green paint, but the carpet must stay. Here are some views of the main gallery area half -painted.

Anniversaries...

This year marks a few important milestones. Being that I let this past year go by without realizing that it has been 25 years since I began selling my art, I wanted to pay a little better attention this year, keeping an eye out for any milestones.

This year will be my 20th as a photographer, so I am planning to have monthly shows of new work at my family's gallery in the Cotton Exchange in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina.

As it turns out, this year is also a milestone for The Golden Gallery as well. This year marks our 30th year in business. My mother started the gallery as a way to sell her watercolors way back in 1977, shortly after my family moved to Wilmington.

The Cotton Exchange had recently been saved from the wrecking ball and urban renewal, and was a small complex of shops in an historic grouping of buildings that had once been saloons, a bordelo and a cotton warehouse. Many shops have come and gone, and we are the only original shop owners left. A few shops and restaurants have remained with new owners, and some new shops will be opening in the next few months.

From the age of 10 years on, I have been spending time in the gallery, from when I used to walk to the gallery after school, in the back room of the gallery building model houses out of scrap matboard, to this last year, when I moved my office into a space in the Cotton Exchange, and now spend part of every day there.

To mark our 30th Anniversary, we are moving across the hall into 2 spaces. This will be our 5th location in the Cotton Exchange, and we are very excited about the prospect of more wall space and a larger back room. We are a working gallery, so there are often several of us working the back room matting, framing and otherwise packaging artwork and filling internet orders.

The pictures here show our current gallery. We moved to our current location several years ago after some repeated flooding in our previous space. It was a hurried move, into about half the space of our previous location. We will be bidding farewell to the brick wall (hard to hang stuff on) and saying hello to having 2 entrances and a more visible storefront.

We have to knock a big whole in the wall between the two spaces, and add a few walls, and paint a lot of walls, but we hope to be in our new digs by March 1st, ready to go another 30 years.

Because I said so...

Somehow, the inspiration for these actually came from those "Beware of pickpockets and loose women signs" in New Orleans. Plus my three kids keep me busy repeating certain things over and over. So, I thought these might be fun to create and it has been great to see people's reactions in the gallery when they come across these.

There are 2 sets of these available at Etsy, with plans to list some larger single pieces later.
EDIT: I have added these to my imagekind store, with large sizes available, plus prints on canvas.

Who knows...?

I'm not really able to put my finger on exactly where the idea for this new series came from, but I think it developed as I was trying to finish this illustration of a bear. He came out smiling, so I thought, "The Happy Bear". Then I had to determine why he would be happy. Hence the big dead fish. So is it a comment on the fact that one's happiness can come at the expense of others, or is it just a big happy bear about to eat a dead fish? Did it just strike me as a funny juxtaposition. I'll leave that to you.

Future entries in this series will include the Disgruntled Skunk, the Persnickety Opossum, and the Hirsute Hedgehog. While it sounds a bit like new books by Lemony Snicket, I think it will be a fun series to produce.

For now, The Happy Bear is available on my Etsy shop, with future plans to offer him on imagekind.

Happy Accidents

Here's some new work that sort of came about by accident. I had this idea to do some work with a little red devil character that I had designed a few years back by superimposing it over a rising sun type background. In the process of creating some more art in that motif, I turned off the layer with the rising sun pattern, and the rest is...well...not history, but the rest is a new style that is reminiscent of propaganda posters. The text in there is tongue in cheek.


These are now available on my Etsy store.

Spreading Prints out all over the web...

Did some searching this weekend to see what kind of outlets there are for my art work on the ol' WWW. Found some new places, and now have galleries in place on many print retail websites.

What spurred this was an email from a retailer that I had joined a few months back. I had kind of forgotten that I had set up a gallery there, and in the meantime, without knowing it , had sold in excess of 50 poster-quality prints. That was a nice surprise.

It was also plenty good reason to expand my web presence to other sites. So...a comprehensive list of places you can get my prints and what's unique to each involved:

Art.com - We have some of my saltwater fish and some of the Lunastrella Series available here as posters. The posters are standard sizes, but our images are not, so you have some excess paper involved. Makes the framing feature relatively useless, but for frame shops and the like, this is a great place to purchase stock.

Visit my Art.com Gallery

ImageKind.com - A relatively young site, with a lot of options for the buyer. You can choose from many different papers for your print and they have a few options for canvas as well. The Framing feature on this site is great, and is the best way to get a framed piece of my work.

Visit my ImageKind Gallery

Etsy.com - The place for all things handmade. I package and ship these pieces myself, and in general, most of the work available is under 12x18 inches. This site is where I go first when releasing new work. You'll probably find more of my work here than anywhere else (besides johnwgolden.com).

Visit My Etsy Shop


BigCartel.com - A cool little place designed for bands, record labels, clothing lines and specialty shops. I'm a specialty shop. Just a few Lunastrella pices there right now, but depending on how those do there, I may expand it.

Visit my BigCartel Shop

JohnWGolden.com - What will eventually be every print and photo that I offer, but with 25 years of ilustrations and 20 years of photos to go through, it's a long process, so not yet the best place to buy, but a good place to browse.

Visit johnwgolden.com

I am also in the process of adding some new retailers that I will be announcing in the coming weeks. I hope you will support these folks as they begin to support me.

The Golden Gallery in Second Life

After talking with an artist friend of mine, I was compelled to take a look at Second Life. The hype machine is running in high gear about this 3-D metaverse, and think what you want about it, but for a would have been an architect if I coulda done math, 2-D artist, it's a fun place. If you're a resident, visit the Golden Gallery in beautiful Han Loso. It's managed by my online personality, Walter Berchot.

Thinking about possibly having some online meet the artist events in the future, which should be interesting. All the art in our Second Life Gallery has Real Life equivalents available for sale as well.

A new series for my 20th Year

I have been hard at work at building my Etsy store as of late. I have added many of a new series of photographs that I have begun to mark my 20th year as a photographer. When I started out most of my work was microcosm shots. Rusty dumpsters, grimy sides of buildings, etc. Over the years, I expanded my subject matter, but I am very excited to have developed a new series that allows me to combine my love of accidental design that occurs when nature and our manmade environments meet with the design that occurs in nature itself.

These images come in 5"x5", 8"x8" and 12"x12" and feature seashells and leaves right now, with fruits and vegetables in the works.

Visit our Etsy shop....

After watching the Etsy.com site for some time, I finally am getting around to opening an Etsy shop of my own. Please visit and check out all the cool stuff on Etsy.

Etsy.com

Stock Backgrounds: Urbanite

One of the first projects created with my latest technique was/is a series of backgrounds called the Urbanite collection. Calling to mind weathered and degraded urban walls, etc., these images are available for download on Lulu.com.

Skateboards

In my younger days, I loved to skateboard, and of course, I was way into the graphics. Unfortunately, my love of skating exceeded my abilities, and also my body's ability to take a pounding, so there was no pro career to be had, and I had to stop doing it on a regular basis.

In comes boardpusher.com, an on-demand fulfillment company specializing in skateboard decks. I get to fulfill a teenage dream and put my art on decks, and boardpusher.com hosts a store and fills orders for me. If nothing else, I have now seen my work on a skateboard.

Check them out. They are a lot of fun to create, and for you skaters, they should be fun to ride.

Finally Fish....

With the arrival of summer here on the North Carolina coast, and after repeated requests, I have turned my eye to a prevalent local subject: Fish. It really is amazing how many fish there are in the species, and it is great fun trying to capture the essence of as many different ones as I can. The plan is to make 40+ images of fish, and it will take a while, but these images have been very popular so far in our brick and mortar shop, the Golden Gallery, so that is at least some incentive to continue with the series.

This series uses a technique I developed over the years involving a dirty scanner and some windex. I can reveal no more, or I risk giving away trade secrets. Suffice to say, it is a lot of fun to use this technique, and I have been very happy with the results.

Finally, one style...

Over the years, I have developed many styles for various projects, and when trying to sell my illustration services, I think it was likely a bit of a drawback, not having one style that is identified with me.

Well, I finally developed a style that allows me to use all the different styles I have developed, and feels like my style. It's a collage based style, a bit battered, and a bit retro that will eventually be available on tees, journals, cards and such.

I liked it enough to recreate the header for the shop and the blog in the new style, and eventually the style drive the new look of johnwgoldendesign.com.

More from the vault...

Around the same time that I was developing my MondoBrat collection, I started a smaller collection, Punchinello.

What started as a little illustration of a hand puppet version of the character, Punch, from Punch and Judy, grew into a collection of 100 images. About 43 of those seemed suitable for merchandising, and those are the basis for our new Punchinello line. The first 9 designs are online, with more to come shortly.

Punchinello has a folksy feel, like a primitive woodcut, and covers subjects from jet packs to accordians.

Mondo what?

Way back in the day, I designed a line of image fonts, fonts with pictures instead of letterforms. They are still available from FontHaus.com under the Ampersand Digital Foundry name.

Around that time, I began to develop some clip art collections as well, but I never did anything with them.

MondoBrat is one of those series, and it has found new life with my CafePress® shop. Images in this series are somewhat squat and definitely rough around the edges. A select few of the over 300 images are available now...

What are these Quelstar Tin Toys?

After several series of robot art, I became interested in the packaging of tin toy robots from science fiction's Golden Age. Since I could not recreate actual artwork from actual robots of that era, I needed to come up with my own robot designs. And there had to be a company that makes them. That led to rayguns, rockets and spaceships.

Eventually that led to the development of characters, from which some of these robots, rayguns and spaceships would have come.

Where it began....

When I was 11 or 12 years old, I began to play around with block printing. With the help of my mother, an artist herself, I created a block print of a sailboat and and one of a surfer. I sold them in my mom's gallery, and eventually sold every print that I made. I don't know if any still exist.

By the time I was 14, I was a bit tired of block prints, and created a series of the North Carolina lighthouses. These were pen and ink drawings of the 7 lighthouses, which we reproduced, and then hand tinted with watercolor.

I later moved on to photography and to acrylic painting to oil painting and to sculpture and to watercolor and to gouache and eventually to computer-based illustration. My niche has been trying to recreat traditional media digitally.

After 20 years of selling the original lighthouse series, I felt the need to revisit the subject matter to show that I have progressed a bit since the age of 14. So, I created a new series of the NC lighthouses, in a style reminiscient of 1930s travel posters. It's sort of a "coming full circle" for me, to revisit some of my earliest subject matter, and I have since begun to turn my attention to other states. A series of the South Carolina lighthouses is underway, and I am gathering reference for every lighthouse in the US.

What's behind the curtain...

Thought I might take a moment to explain a little bit about what drives me to create the work I do. Certains things just strike my fancy, like robots and the Golden age of Science Fiction. I am a bit of a collector, and I love kitsch, and I tend to yearn for times past, when more people were polite and helpful.

Being a graphic designer by trade, it has fallen to me many times in my past to have to recreate a graphic look from a bygone era, and that has translated into many illustration styles for me. I have had the opportunity to work at the international level with some great designers, and you can't spend time with those people without gaining new insight into art and design. I picked up a few new interests from them, too.

I will use this blog to tell a little bit about each design or series of designs I do, and to announce new ones. I hope you will return often, and that you will find this insight interesting.