It’s the second week of April, and we are well into the season of Spring! My sugar snap peas, tulips, and daffodils are already coming up in the garden beds, and our indoor seedlings are looking good as well. It’s an exciting and uplifting time of the year when we start to see greenery once again. Soon, when the flowers bloom, there will be a variety of bright colors to enjoy and inspire me. This means more scenes and subjects to paint!
For the past several weeks I have been preparing originals to sell. See, they have been piling up in my studio, and I am ready to part with them so as to make room for new works. I don’t have the space to keep them all, plus they should be displayed and enjoyed, rather than buried and unseen in a corner of my studio. So, I would like to find good permanent homes for them.
The paintings on stretched canvas needed hangers, so I installed metal D-rings and picture wire on the backs of those, to complete them for market. I also paint the side edges of all of my stretched canvases, for a finished look.
The majority of my gouache paintings were painted on thick watercolor paper. They were taped down to a Masonite panel when I paint them, but when the painting is finished and I remove the tape, the paper still curls. The paper itself does not sit flat. I had two boxes filled with stacks of these curled gouache paintings. And some of them had not been varnished yet. I use cold wax medium to varnish them (to protect them from any kind of moisture) and then I glued them to rigid canvas panels, to make the paintings flat. Gluing the paintings to rigid panels also served the purpose of making the finished painting a more conventional size: 9 inches x 12 inches. See, I would split 11 x 14 sheets of watercolor paper into two sheets, but that would make each painting an odd size of 7.5 x 11. Adhering them to a 9 x 12 panel allows them to fit in a standard size picture frame. For a more finished look I painted a border around each panel with a neutral color and then centered the painting on the panel. I spent weeks gluing gouache paintings to panels.
At the time of this blog post, I am still varnishing and adhering gouache paintings to rigid panels. I have quite a few more to go. I am a one man show here, so it’s a lot of work and very time-consuming. It takes away from creating new things, but this is a necessary task in order to find new homes for these works. So, I am not complaining.
After I prepared a good number of my original artworks for market, I decided to list them on eBay. So, I opened up an eBay store. I listed 40 paintings in my eBay store, so far, and more will be added in the coming weeks and beyond. Each painting comes with a Certificate of Authenticity, hand-signed and dated by me (see photos in my eBay listings). Paintings will be protected for shipping by packaging them securely and mailing them via insured USPS Priority Mail.
Of course, high-quality reproduction prints are always available in my website store, printed in high resolution with waterproof archival pigment inks on 19 mil, 260 g/m2, archival textured matte velvet fine art paper, 100% cotton fiber and acid free. I sign those too.
I currently have another larger painting on my easel, that I would like to get back to (and a time-lapse video of its creation), and I have more originals to list. I’d like to get back into some drawing also, pencil or ink.
I hope 2026 will be a productive and fruitful year for my art and that it connects with people in a positive way. Thanks for stopping by and reading this. I hope you’ll check out my stores and that you’ll see something there that you like.