Just got a picture of this tile installed in a backsplash. If there had been a lot more of them, I’d have printed at least part of that pattern. As it was, with only 12 of them, I just traced an outline for the bigger shapes, handpainted that in, and free-handed the rest of the pattern. Nice of the clients to send me this picture, but I wish they’d waited till the project was really completed. That way I wouldn’t have had to Photoshop out the electric cord leading to an outlet without a cover on it that was right next to the tile. And I could have included the stove. I couldn’t quite figure out how to eliminate whatever it was that the cord led to that was laying on the stove. I couldn’t figure out from the picture what that was, either.
This is a scene featuring St. Mary Peak in the Bitterroot Range in western Montana. In the foreground is a historic ranch and the Bitterroot River.
Still painting. Here’s a nice one. This is 24” x 36”
My latest painting, 36” x 24”. Snow Lake is one of the most popular hike3s in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area. I had my friend Kim throw rocks for me.
Not much tile work going on these days so I’ve been painting. Here’s my latest. It’s 12” x 24”.
This is the biggest one I’ve done this year- 80 square feet on 12” x 24” tiles. The drawing shows how it will lay out in the shower. Too bad it won’t be installed till probably February. These big tiles are hard to handle but great to paint on. The single tree is too wide to fit on the table, but you can see how the one tile goes off to the left and the other off to the right.
This one went out last week. It will go around a window in a new condo up at Snoqualmie Summit ski area. It features the mountain itself, the chair list there, a yeti (NOT a Susquatch) hiding in the trees, and the Running of the Rainiers, which all long-time Northwesterners will remember.
This was one of those jobs where everything went wrong from the beginning. This little fish mural is going to a house in the Bahamas, and the job came to me through a designer in Florida. Why are the jobs for designers always the most trouble? So since china paint is affected by the underlying glaze color, the fish couldn’t be done on blue tile. Besides, they were particular about the color of the blue tile. And they wanted a “handmade look”, meaning not flat or square. I could have made them myself, but I haven’t done that in years, so I had a local friend make these tiles and 40 sf of field tiles. They didn't like any of the 4 blue glazes she had, so we had her make them white and then I china painted them blue. This doubled the price for them, but they didn’t care. It was also probably 10 times what it would have been if they’d just used commercial tile. So we did that, shipped them off, and about half of them broke- probably because they were not flat. Having replacement tiles made and shipping them cost me about $700. Shipped them off and sent an invoice, including an invoice taped across the seam of one of the boxes so they couldn’t miss it. A week after I know they’ve gotten them, I email to see if they were OK. They waited 3 weeks before they even opened the boxes. Ten days after they tell me they’re OK, I ask if they’ve sent a check. It went out on Monday. Ten days later, has the check been sent? It went out on Monday. Ten days after that I finally get the final payment yesterday. This job started back in February. i hope they call again some day so I can tell them to go to hell.
Every year since about 2006 I’ve done a tile for a high school in eastern Washington. They have a contest among the graduating seniors to design a tile for their class and I reproduce it in china paint on an 8” tile for them. The tiles are all displayed in the lobby of the school. Due to budget issues, this year’s tile was delayed into the new school year, but here it is.
These tiles just went home last week. They’ll be going behind a stove. They look like traditional majolica tiles, but they’re china paint. I did trace a couple of the outlines of the main shapes, but these are almost completely free-hand, mostly with brushes but the fine black lines are done with a pen. Too bad about the big glare spot, though.
