Sheila M. Evans

This is it, actually.  I had planned to run both my original website and my blog simultaneously, but after a long day’s work getting this blog ready to actually publish (yes, I’ve been posting to an unpublished blog for two months!) I decided, with some arm twisting from Paul, that this would be my site. I liked my old site, and Paul spent many hours setting it up for me. However, it was not easy for me to edit and I felt like a jerk asking him to do updates. So I didn’t. My hope is that I will keep this site updated very regularly, with blog posts, new work, upcoming events, news, and maybe some special offers of artwork along the way.

Pretty much everything that I had on the old site is here. To the right I have galleries of pastel and oil paintings, bio stuff, a news page, links to my galleries, etc. plus a cool new gigs calendar at the bottom. That should look much more interesting as my show calendar fills up (hopefully!) in the spring. To quote Dane Cook, which I promise I will never do again, “I DID MY BEST!!!”  Hope you like it.

In an earlier post I mentioned that one new skill I would need was photographing oil paintings for show entries. I have some decent photography lights with stands, but they don’t have soft boxes or any other light-diffusing accessories. They worked fine with my pastels using only a polarizing filter on my camera lens, but created way too much glare on oils. During the summer I successfully photographed my first  small batch of oils by setting up under one of my art fair tents in the backyard, which provided a lot of nice diffused light but which made lining up the camera a challenge given the uneven ground in the yard. Setting up the tent also takes quite a while and now, with lower light and an eastern Washington winter approaching, the backyard tent method seemed even more daunting. So with my first show deadline approaching, my husband and I decided to figure out a different way to take the necessary photographs.  We took one entire afternoon, going to the fabric store and searching for just the right white fabric to diffuse the lights, then devising a method of hanging the fabric from a dowel attached

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