About Erin Libby

I am a painter, sculptor, illustrator, art educator and recovering commercial artist. I trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Western Washington University, with a brief stint at Mexico City College. Mexico City College gave me my foundation technique of egg tempera. I am a working painter, currently showing at the Blue Horse Gallery in Bellingham and Gallery by the Bay in Stanwood, Washington. Look for my work in Fairhaven at Olivia Cornwall Gallery.

I've been teaching art for a very long time. I hope that you find this blog helpful.

Friday, November 9, 2012

Prints for sale!!! I often get requests for prints from my paintings. Some are up at fineartamerica.com. More to come, slowly.

This is what I found out about digital print on demand: I had to go back to the original photograph, direct from the camera, of the paintings to get enough resolution for the printing process. Sometimes I have to reshoot the painting. The process works if the original image is color-corrected in Photoshop, but not downsized or re-sampled.

I took a master class in egg tempera painting in England in October, 2012. Wow, Koo Schadler really knows how to take a good painter and move forward to excellent and amazing. The excellent painters moved forward to mastery. Two of my classmates, Sara Harding and Paige Barry, are on facebook, and you can see their work.

One of the things that Koo does is to really spend time on her prep work. She sets up her still life with an eye to what a painter from 1450 would reaching for. The focus is on directness and simplicity. She then takes a photograph lit with a single light source.  When she has the composition resolved to her satisfaction, she works mostly from the photograph.

The result is intimate and masterful. Egg tempura is both translucent and precise. The image glows in way that it cannot be acheived in any other media.

Of course, it's tremendously painstaking. Egg tempera paintings are tiny and time comsuming. No wonder the impressionists would rather glob on oil paint. So much less work and a larger scale for the emotional impact.

After Koo's help, I came home and spent several hours redoing my last egg tempera painting. It's called "Mudmask Luncheion." It's a goup of somewhat improbable people having an improbable picnic. The lady in the mudmask is the beauty that you always have to invite to the party.