HOW I STARTED

Many of my students ask how I got started in professional painting. I am including my own story and those of a few other artists in this book to illustrate the fact that most of us do not have glamorous beginnings. It is only through hard work, perseverance and good fortune that we are able to do what we love and make a living at it.

I have been drawing and painting for as long as I can remember. I grew up watching my mother make arts and crafts at the kitchen table, and I wanted to do what she was doing. I always enjoyed art in school and if a class involved an art project (like making a volcano for geography class) my grade always benefited. I was an average student, and the only subjects I did well in were history and art.

I graduated from high school in 1970 and my family expected me to go to college. Fortunately, at that time they did not have as difficult requirements to get into college as they do today. I decided to go to The Ohio State University and study art because I really had no other ideas about what I could do. I considered the commercial art program, but learned at freshman orientation that it was no longer offered. So, I enrolled in a general art studies program and ended up majoring in sculpting and minoring in painting. I graduated and looked for a job as an artist. I quickly realized my college sculpting and painting portfolio was not what the advertising companies were looking for. (I didn’t know this, but throughout my college career, my father had been asking my mother, “What the hell does he think he is going to do with an art degree?”)

I ended up working in shipping and receiving at a factory where I was made fun of as the only college-educated person on the factory floor. After being late to work 183 days in a row, I was fired. (Who knows why it took them that long to fire me.)

Soon after being fired, I was riding my motorcycle down a street that was under construction for a HomeArama showcase of homes. It was late in the day, and I entered a home that looked interesting. All of the workers had left for the day. As I was admiring that large, open, contemporary two-story home, a woman walked in and asked “Can I help you? I own this home.” I feared I would be arrested for trespassing. Fortunately, the woman was nice and gave me a tour. On the way out, I asked her if she needed any sculpting or painting done. She asked me if I did any “super graphics” and I told her I didn’t know what they were. “Large murals,” she explained. I said, “Sure, I can do those,” with no idea on earth how to do them. She told me to speak with her interior designer, which I did, and I showed him my college portfolio. I got the job and painted two murals for the entire three weeks before the show started. One mural was to incorporate the client’s son’s Formula One race car bed into a scene on the wall behind it. The other was a woodland scene that accented a swing hanging from a ceiling rafter in the client’s daughter’s room.

When I was awarded the job, I had no idea how to paint a mural that large. My mother helped me devise a grid system to enlarge the designs the client approved. Then I painted the murals to match the colors the designer wanted. It went smoothly until the designer asked me to paint the inside of the woodland mural’s main tree yellow. I thought, Yellow, trees are not yellow, and I just went to art school why would you want a tree yellow? I made excuses why the tree was not painted yellow, and the show came and went with the tree remaining the color I wanted it. The designer never used me again for the next twenty-five years because I wanted it my way.

ARTIST’S INSIGHT

My first mural was for a disco and restaurant in 1988. The owner, who enjoyed horses, visited the studio I had in the French Alps at the time and asked me to do a mural for his restaurant. He wanted a landscape with the wild horses of Camargue (in the South of France near the Mediterranean Sea). At that time, I had never painted a surface bigger than a breakfast tray. (I was painting toys, little boxes and small pieces of furniture.) But I took the job, saying it was not a problem for me. I told the client I was very busy (big lie!) and that I wouldn’t have time to work on the project for a few months. I knew I needed time to practice. I had to find out what type of brush I would use to paint on such a “grand” scale [6' × 13' (2m × 4m)]. I started doing studies of horses in a relatively big scale. It looked terrible and I was about to call the client to tell him I could not do the job…but I did not. I bought several plywood panels and did the mural full size on these panels…twice!

I carefully wrote down all the steps during the second go. I still remember that I had twenty-nine steps. When I was ready, I made the appointment with the client. I went to the client’s place on Monday morning and opened up my toolbox with my notes and my twenty-nine steps. I started at step 1 and reached step 29 the next day by noon.

The client was so happy that he immediately ordered another mural! This is how I began.

—Pascal Amblard

When it came to pricing, I had no idea how much to charge for these two murals, let alone how long it would take. I had been making $4.10 per hour at the factory, so I thought $50.00 for each mural sounded good. Then I painted the two murals and when I finished, I realized I had made way less money per hour than I thought I would. Has anyone else made this kind of error?

I did a lot of things right on this job, but I also made a lot of mistakes. I learned:

• To ask for a job and to promote myself were good things (see Networking,).

• If I said I could do something I had never done before, I had better be able to figure it out (see Working with Clients).

• I should do what the client wants, not only what I want (see Service).

• If I wanted to stay in business I had to learn how to price my jobs to make a profit (see Pricing).

All in all, this first job taught me many things that I still use in my business today. The moral of this story for me is to do my very best on each job, to honestly critique myself on the pros and cons of that project, to learn from them both, and on the next project, improve on my weak areas and enhance my strong areas even more.

ARTIST’S INSIGHT

My first mural was at an Italian restaurant/pizzeria owned by a friend from my neighborhood in New York. The mural was a surrealistic Italian landscape, with a bust of the Greek god Hermes. I was painting while the restaurant was open, so all eyes were watching me. Since I was inexperienced at painting large-scale murals, I was very nervous and probably spent the first hour rearranging my drop cloths, paints and tools just so the audience would know that I knew what I was doing! I finally got started, and since I lacked confidence, I started painting very lightly, using a drop of paint and a lot of water…almost as light as tea. It was so thin that I’m sure most of my audience thought I was pretending to paint (not unlike the fairy tale of the emperor’s new clothes)! Once I painted my first layer, I liked what I did, so I added more paint to the water to increase the values. I gained more confidence with each layer, adding more and more paint. Eventually, after about twenty layers, I finished the job.

Looking back now, with the skills I’ve built since that time, I probably could have done the same mural in three to four layers. So the technique that I have developed is not unlike watercolor—glazed color on a white ground. This stems from my understanding of the relationship of glazed color to a basecoat and the lessons I learned when my stepfather and I took an evening watercolor class together during my teenage years. Light goes through the glaze, hits the white base, and reflects back through the veil of color. This creates a luminosity that I could not achieve with opaque paint. An example would be painting a flower white first then glazing over the white with red. This would create a vivid pink that would be very difficult to achieve mixing red and white together on my palette, which for me always leaned towards pastels.

Years later I discovered that the nineteenth century Pre-Raphaelites as well as the twentieth century illustrator Maxwell Parish realized the same technique. I like to say that my technique is based on fear—light to dark, getting more courage with each layer. You gain experience with each pass of color.

Each successful experience diminishes fear and creates confidence. Confidence tramples fear underfoot.

—Sean Crosby