With my wife being out of town for a few days to attend to some business related to a retreat she's doing with a girlfriend of hers, I thought I would get a jump start on finding more rocks to paint a from the holidays.
I started off by checking the tide tables on a local website, and discovered that the tides really aren't very favorable at the moment, and then I checked the weather and noticed that we are promised three days straight of heavy rains and lots of high winds, so I decided that I would get out there and do whatever I could in the short window between about 5:00 PM and sundown.
Finding rocks to paint on is actually a fairly prolonged process because I only bring home the ones that seem to be at least "definite maybes" and on our local beach here that might be about one-in-a-hundred rocks I look at.
Because I've been doing this for a substantial number of years, I've become somewhat adept at being able to pick out the right kind of surface from a distance but on a beach with large piles of pebbles like we have you can't always see all of the rock that may have a promising corner.
Evening mood on the beach
At least 70-80% of the time — most likely more — I will pick up a rock that I thought looked promising and discover that it has a crack or it has a big chip out on one side or it's an irregular shape or the bottom is not flat enough that it would sit reasonably on a table.
There's far more to this process than just "pick up a rock and paint it!"
The way I look at it... first the surface has to be smooth enough that the paint isn't going to "drift" and go into cracks. After all, my mandalas are pretty detailed.
Once that's done the rock has to be smooth enough that when it sits on a table the wobble is only minimal and it definitely has a "back" and a "front." There are a great many times when I pick up a rock that has one perfect side but the perfect side turns out to be the one that works best when facing downwards and so the rock doesn't come home with me.
No room for errors and flaws...
I also don't really like to feel rushed when I'm out there... and today I felt a little bit of time pressure because I realized if I didn't pick up a good supply of rocks I would end up having to wait another three days. Whereas I have no shortage of things I could be doing, I'd rather get going with some of the things I really need to build stock in.
So I did end up finding a couple or three dozen rocks that are paintable, so the next step in the process is bringing them home where they then get thoroughly washed and warm water (no detergents, because those leave a residue) to basically remove sand and salt and bits of seaweed that are stuck to the rocks.
Getting a bath
Then I set them out on a towel to dry and make sure that they're thoroughly dry before I can start painting on them.
Of course the next thing that happens is I have to start classifying them. By "classifying," I mean I have certain series or styles or sizes that require certain types of rocks.
Drying time. The striped stones at right are for another project I'm working on
Coming into the Christmas holidays and subsequently Valentine's Day shortly after New Year's, the most important stone that I need — sadly, I might say — is for what we call our "pocket hearts." It's probably the most prosaic thing I make and the most "mass produced," in the sense that it's a small stone — maybe up to an inch and a half in diameter — on which I paint a red heart and then surround it with a little bit of a geometric pattern.
They're quick and easy to paint, and we sell them for $6.00 each and they typically go out the door like hotcakes! On the surface you might say "that seems like a lot of work for just $6" but the thing here is that it it's not unusual for people to buy three or four or five of them, and sometimes we've even sold as much as a dozen, at which point the whole thing becomes a little more viable.
Pocket Hearts
Given that they actually only take about 10 minutes each to finish — especially if I've got a lot of them and I'm just doing that one thing all day — it's not as futile a deal as it might sound and whereas it is definitely not my favorite kind of creative work I take some solace in the fact that it pays for the paint and sometimes it even pays for the vendor booth fees and a few other things.
When you are what I might call a "production artist" there are certain things you just make yourself do because they fund the rest of the things that you really want to do. In all things, balance.
And that was pretty much my creative day for today so I just wanted to post this quick update and then get on with my other work!
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2024.10.17 AS-TXT-285/255