CALDERA TAP HOUSE PAINTING

Here's a photo of me putting the finishing touches on the painting I've been posting about these past couple weeks. The new Caldera Tap House is set to open to the public on Monday, and there's an invite-only opening tomorrow night in Ashland, Oregon. This photo was taken last night, so glad I got this done in time.

ALMOST DONE

Almost done with this painting for the new Caldera Tap House in Ashland, Oregon. As you can see in this photo, the wall is fairly rough, but I think overall the painting has come out well. All that's left now is to fill in the oval and then it's on to finishing work, including drawing the black outlines for the individual hop leaves, and also drawing black outlines around the edges of all green leaves and the barley at the bottom. A friend recommended using a paint pen, which is a great idea, as then the width of the line would be consistent.

CALDERA TAP HOUSE, PART 4

Almost done with this painting at the new Caldera Tap House in Ashland, Oregon. Getting the yellow to orange fade was not as hard as I'd thought; I just went for it and painted as fast as I could before the paint could dry. A friend suggested using matte medium or gesso to help with the blend, but I just used straight house paints and a fairly dry brush.

CALDERA TAP HOUSE, PART 3

Well, if you've been reading my blog recently you'll know I'm working on the painting of the Ashland Amber label for the inside of the new Caldera Tap House in Ashland, Oregon. It's amazing how long it takes to paint something like this. After finishing all the green leaves, I think I need to go back in and make the yellow veins a little narrower, which can be done by painting into them a little bit with the green paint. The tricky part will be the orange to red fade for the sunset sky above the mountain. Someone suggested I just paint a solid orange up to the banner (see original image below for reference), and then paint red above the banner, which is probably what I'll do. This housepaint stuff just doesn't blend well at all, and with the uneven surface of the wall it'd be very hard to pull off an even fade.

CALDERA TAP HOUSE

It's amazing how long it takes to paint just a little bit. Yesterday I spent about five hours painting this image, and I still have a ways to go. The Caldera Tap House is supposed to open this Monday, so I have a lot of work to do between now and then, but at least the place is air conditioned with satellite radio.

CALDERA TAP HOUSE

Today was supposed to be the official opening day of the new Caldera Tap House in Ashland, Oregon.

Of course, with only two weeks between the closing of the old Siskiyou Pub (which is the building Caldera is now using for their new tap house) and today, I knew it was optimistic to think they'd open today.

Actually, I'm glad, 'cause I would have really had to rush this painting I'm working on, and it's my first time using house paints of any kind, let alone using them for painting a large detailed image on a wall that's got a surface like the moon. I was stoked that Caldera decided to use the more expensive environmentally friendly paints, both for the greater good and for myself having to breathe the fumes while working indoors.

Below is the label I did for Caldera's Ashland Amber. There's a projector inside facing the stage, and the idea was to get the label on a CD and project it on the wall to trace. However, the DVD player the projector's hooked up to wouldn't read the CD, so I had to take this shot of the printed version with my cheap digital camera and use the DVD player's USB port to get the image to finally show up on the wall. This only took two days to figure out...


Here's a couple of shots of the paints used:



Drawing the outline on the rough wall using a slightly out-of-focus projector was a challenge, but it came out okay in the end.


I had to mix my own paints, and I screwed up the first mix of purple, which ended up being too dark for the section I used it on. I'll have to go back over it tomorrow with the right color. I added the yellow lines for the veins in the hop leaves and called it a day.