~ New Features: Fun Stuff & Gifts
Dj’s artwork pops
off the wall
By
Anita Drinkfast |
For many years people
have asked if they could get their favorite images of Dj’s
work on a coffee mug or tote bag or other such items and the
answer has always been, unfortunately no. The high cost of printing,
storing, and shipping such items was more than a small operator
could afford. Printing costs alone would run into the high thousands
of dollars, then would come the expense of storing the items
in a safe place until they sold, and of course packaging and
shipping such a var iety
of items presented an expensive problem as well. So by the time
all of the expenses were accounted for the price point of a
coffee mug or tote bag or what-have-you would be astronomical.
But then along came CafePress who has made the creation and
sales of coffee mugs, tote bags, t-shirts, and other such items
featuring images of Dj’s work affordable.
CafePress was founded in 1999 by Fred Durham and Maheesh Jain
who started their business in a garage in San Leandro,
California. Now, ten years later, CafePress has approximately
300+ employees in two locations with their corporate headquarters
in Foster City, California and a production facility in Louisville,
Kentucky. CafePress is a print and ship on demand service featuring
a wide variety of items that are sold through a Shopkeeper’s
individual online storefront. In the case of Dj Johnston his
CafePress storefront can be accessed through the
Fun Stuff & Gifts page
or by clicking on the following link:
http://www.cafepress.com/djfineart.
Dj’s storefront is new so there are only a limited number
of images and items currently being offered; however, the number
of images and items will be expanding over the coming months
so check the Fun Stuff & Gifts page often to see what’s
new or sign up for Dj’s Newsletter to be informed when
a new image or item is added. In the meantime if there is a
specific image of Dj’s work you would like on a specific
item (coffee mug, t-shirt, etc.) contact Dj at dj@djfineart.com
and let him know and he will create it for you. |
~ New Features: A Blog
Utt-oh, He's Blogg'n!
by Dj Johnston |
To me Web Logs
(commonly known as Blogs, but I like to think of them as We’ogs)
are like butt-holes, everybody’s got one but only the
fetish people want to see them all. So with that idea in mind
I have resisted creating a blog (we’og) of my own for
many years. The reasoning was this, “who cares what
I have to say about anything?” That reasoning appears
to have been faulty and it seems that the viewers of my work
like to know what I’m thinking about when I’m
creating my pieces, and I have been told that people like
to follow the progress of individual pieces as they are being
worked on. So this year I have succumbed and started writing
a we’og (blog) where I will post articles about works
in progress, photos of completed images, my thoughts on art,
life, and any other damn thing I feel like writing about.
To access the we’og click on the following link: http://www.djfineart.com/blog/blog.html.
A direct link will be added to the menu bar of www.djfineart.com
soon. But I warn you, not everything posted there will concern
art, and some of it might even be offensive – I get
that way sometimes. So proceed with caution and at your own
risk.
|
"If stupidity got us into this
mess, then why can't it get us out?"
|
Stay up to date with Dj
and his artwork, sign up for our weekly monthly
occasional newsletter.
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~ New Work: Summer's Song
Sketch Gone Wild:
"Summer's Harvest"
by Dj Johnston |
It
started as a simple sketch to layout the design and color scheme
for an oil painting, but then things went haywire.  All
of my paintings start with an idea I want to express or a story
I want to tell, and Summer’s Harvest started with story –
in this case it’s the story of a woman (Summer) coming in
from the garden with the day’s bounty of vegetables and flowers
which she places on the table then proceeds to disrobe, leaving
her hat and gloves on the table and her jeans, shirt, and lacy bra
draped over the back of the chair as she heads off to the shower.
Usually the idea or story is developed in a series of quick pencil
sketches to help me find the best composition for developing the
idea or for telling the story.
Once the composition sketch is further defined, I use colored pencils
to rough in the colors I want to use to express the feeling and
look of the i mage.
It is usually at this time that I redraw the image on a stretched
and primed canvas and dive into the oil painting process. However,
the Summer’s Harvest sketch had a different plan. It started
with the sketch whispering, I’m not kidding it actually whispered,
into my ear that I needed to further define the purple cabbage.
The purple cabbage will be difficult to render, the sketch told
me, so you should fully develop it to bring out the richness of
the colors and the subtleties of the highlights. Doing so led me
to further develop the green beans, on which I used a burnishing
technique of going over the various greens with a soft white colored
pencil to make them look shiny and waxy. Well, of course, as with
all of life one thing leads to another and once I started having
fun coloring in the vegetables the sunflowers were my next target.
When I was finished with them I took on the challenge of rendering
the hat and jeans with the aim of making them enhance the overall
look of the scene. And before I knew it the story of Summer’s
Harvest has been told in colored pencil on paper and therefore I
had no need or desire to retell it with oil paints. So now “Summer’s
Harvest” stands as a completed work of colored pencil on paper.
But then again, I do like the story of a woman coming in from the
garden and disrobing in the kitchen, so I think I might tell a version
of that story in oil after all and this time actually include Summer
in her own story.
"Summer's Harvest"
Click the image to go to the
"Summer's Harvest" page.
|
Copyright, Dj Johnston 2009, All Rights Reserved. |
