Rosey Painting Timelapse+Future Choir Happenings+Mitch Hedberg on Cooking vs. Farming+a peek behind the curtain about creating these videos (Patreon)

I didn't do a walkthrough for this one. The process was very similar to After Party Delerium. So check that out for more info about the painting process. I'm going to give a kind of behind the scenes of what goes into making the videos of these paintings and my background in filmmaking.

Coming up in the Choir

This is the last one of this newest series of paintings! I've got a bunch of canvases and panels that I've been prepping and starting on for the next batch. I'll be sharing the process of those in real time as I work on them. Plus I have a few that I'm finishing up and will start editing the videos of them soon.

I have 3 finished pieces that will be in a gallery show in a few weeks, so I'll probably rush the video of that to the front of the line this weekend. So I can show the Choir before I start using it to promote the show on social media. I have a lot of videos and pics of the process of those that I'll start sharing exclusively here next week. 

After that one, I'm going to do the Intro to Drawing Bad Art lesson on drawing with organic forms, then We'll be moving on to value. 

I have 3 books that I'm currently writing about for new Art Life and Lives. 

I've also started a monthly newsletter called the "Sort of" Choir. I created it to give people a sample of what we're up to in here. But you might want to subscribe to it so that you can get a summary of what I've posted in case you miss anything.

A Peak behind the Curtain

The Video and Images

I film just about every step of the process for my paintings. I have tripods, cameras, lights and other accessories for filming set up right by my easel so that it's easy to just hit record. I don't have super fancy high resolution cameras or anything else for that matter. My filming set up is actually very crude and jerry rigged together. DIY you could even say.

I either shoot on my phone or on a camcorder. Right now it's kind of an arbitrary choice of which one I use. The phone has a good time-lapse setting that I like to use. The camcorders are good for filming long stretches in real time and I have two of them so I can sync up my pallet camera and my painting camera. 

Sometimes I record with sound and I use an old school clapboard to sync that up with my sound recorder.

After I'm done with the painting I get a very high quality digital image of it, usually by scanning it. Then I color correct it in photo shop and upload the image to my shop.

At this point I usually realize that I don't have a name for it. But my struggle with naming my work is a subject for a different time. 

After I have an image of the painting, I do the varnishing and framing part of the painting process. On the video front, I organize all the footage of the painting into a folder on a hard drive.

Watching and Editing

I import the folder it into my editing program, put the footage chronologically on a timeline and watch the whole process. If I filmed the footage in real time, I speed it up.

I recomend filming a timelapse of your drawing or painting. Not necessarily to share. I don't just watch the footage of myself to figure out how I'm going to edit the video. This is where overlap of the painting process and film making process peaks.

In addition to thinking about how I'm going to edit the video, I watch the video back and see how my painting looks. Not the painting, the painting process. 

Are there things I would change about how I did it? Was there was a point where I started losing something interesting that I had early on? Did I overcomplicate it? Why am I "choking up" on the brush too much? Those kinds of thoughts. 

I find it makes me more observant as an artist. It distills hours of work to thirty seconds. You start to see the bigger picture of how you are drawing or painting. It's a way of stepping back.

Meanwhile, on the video editing front, I'm also thinking about the music I'm going to put together during this first watch.

The Sound and Music

I love making music, I always have. One of the reasons I started making videos in the first place was to give myself an excuse to make music.

I use a sound library called Splice  which has millions of samples sorted by tempo, key, genre, instruments etc. They are all royalty free so you can use them however you want. I just start looking for sounds that seem to fit with the painting. once I find one that seems right, I use the tempo and key of that sound to start finding other sounds to build a song.

Then I put the song into the video project and edit the video to conform to the music.

The Words

I try and write down anything that strikes me as interesting about the creation of the painting while I'm working on it. Anything about the process, what I was thinking about, any train of thought that seems of interest. Mining for potential. Kernels of ideas that lead to videos.

I basically write a script. If I don't have any ideas, I just start describing what I'm doing in the video. Literal description of what is happening. Sometimes that ends up being the video. Sometimes that just allows my brain to wake up and leads me to something more interesting and I just follow that line of thought.

Every video is different. For the Intro to Drawing Bad Art Course, I write what I'm going to say first, then I treat that like a shot list and make sure that I draw the stuff that correlates to what I'm talking about. 

For the Art Life and Lives videos, I just write without thinking about what video will be playing. I'll choose a video that seems appropriate for the subject later.

Then I record myself reading the script. The most awkward phase because, despite how much I talk, I really don't like the sound of my own voice. I put the recording into the video project and start editing that video. I edit my voice first by itself. Line by line. Making sure it makes sense. Cutting out stuff that doesn't. Editing for content. Editing for time. (As we say in show biz.)

Then I put the video on top of that, conforming it to the new length of the voice over.

The Process

I have a background in film making. I spent 4 years writing, filming and editing videos for classes. So a lot of stuff about where to put the camera, checking lighting, getting different angles, editing, sound, is just engrained in me. Its a natural thought process to me now.

I'm not saying I'm a master at this stuff, or that all my videos are home runs. But when, for example I film a video and I realize there was an interesting sound that I can't use because I had music playing while I was filming, I'll re record the sound, or try and find a good sound effect that matches it so that the video is just a teeny tiny bit more enjoyable to watch. 

Anyways. All this is to say that the process of making the videos is just as much of an art form to me as the art I'm making in the videos. 

After writing all this I'm realizing that I should maybe do a short video or at least take some pictures of this video process stuff. 

I Can't Farm

I studied film making because I wanted to make films. Sounds crazy, but that's why I did it. I love the process of creating images and sound and them putting them together in a compelling way. But there is film making and then this other thing that is superficially related to film making but entirely different. Making a living as a person trained in making films. Long story short, I started painting instead of doing that. The late great comedian Mitch Hedberg had this bit:

"I got into comedy to do comedy, which is weird I know. but when you're in Hollywood and you're a comedian people ask you to all these other things besides comedy. They'll say 'Alright you're a stand up comedian... can you act? Can you write? Write us a script.' They want you to do things that are related to comedy but not comedy. That's not fair. It's as if I were a cook and I worked my ass off to become a good cook and they said, 'alright, you're a cook...can you farm?'"

That's how I felt after film school. "Alright you wanna make films? can you help our producers move their offices to a new building for 20 dollars in gas money 14 hours a day this weekend?"

I know, I know, that that type of thing can actually lead to people's careers. Networking and opportunities and all that blah blah. But I wanted to cook rather than farm, and it felt a lot like farming.

Painting was a more direct and sure way to cook for me. Not a sure way to make a living as a cook. But a sure way to make sure I was cooking and not slowly sliding into becoming a farmer while trying to become a cook.

But making these videos have allowed my love of the filmmaking process to align with my love of creating bizarre surrealist art. I feel super fulfilled while working on them for hours on end. 

And your support is making that possible so thank you!

Painting Info:

• Rosey
• Acrylic on frottage drawing on birch panel.
• 4x6 inches
• Available on Etsy or on my Website