Gail Niebrugge's Blog
Alaska comes alive during the holidays with tiny colorful lights everywhere. Our long days of darkness are enhanced by outdoor lights. This is a photo of the studio/residence at 9:00AM, December 2, the upstairs studio lights have been on for hours where I am hard at work. The shortest day (solstice) is a few weeks [...]
Sometimes it seems that everything I touch is screwed up, and this week is no exception. Sometimes I feel like a prisoner to recorded telephone messages. My website shopping cart is down and after two days of work it is not restored. I’m loosing sales and customers, this is distressing. I thought I was staying [...]
Last week when making our mosaic concrete stepping stones we ended up with an excess of wet cement. Not ones to let a valuable resource go to waste the group gathered some giant rhubarb leaves, placed them on piles of rounded sand and began shoveling cement over them. Shown above are neighbors Mary Mystrom shoveling [...]
Gathered in the hangar waiting to un-mold our fabulous mosaic stepping stone creations, left to right; Bob Niebrugge, Lois Munford, John Mues, Jack Simpson, Dennis & Carol Eby, Joann Collins with visiting brother on her left, me, Sue Mues, taking the photo Mary Mystrom, missing; Sonya Falconer, Kathy and Lindie Sage. Our first attempts will [...]
Inspired by the recent garden tours a few of us decided to make mosaic stepping stones to decorate our own gardens. To begin we researched “How to Make Mosaic Stepping Stones” on the internet where several teaching videos and step-by-step instructions gave us enough confidence to try. We gathered a bunch of tiles, glass beads, [...]
After a summer of rain in Alaska’s Matanuska valley we’ve had a beautiful, unseasonably warm fall. Very few nights have dipped below 32º and daytime temperatures have been in the high 40′s to low 50′s. The lawns are still green, Trumpeter swan and ducks feed freely along the shoreline of the unfrozen lake, and fishermen [...]
September in Alaska brings crisp nights and warm days with long, gorgeous sunsets. The cloud cover has hidden our view of the blazing evening sky a high percent of the time last summer, but if you watch patiently sometimes just before dark the clouds will part a bit and reveal the beauty of the very [...]
We had fun embroidering the barren lilac tree with multi-colored lights and creating tiny white sparkles on several spruce trees in the front yard at Niebrugge Studio. It was beginning to look a lot like Christmas, stealing a line from a song! There is something wonderful about lighting up the darkness of winter in Alaska [...]
Keeping the driveway cleared and safe is a priority at the studio/residence, especially during this busy pre-Christmas shopping season. Nothing is worse than rain after a heavy snow. During rain tire tracks that were made before the new snow was plowed end up turning into solid ice because the ground is frozen. The longer the [...]
The Niebrugge Studio residence took a different approach this year and decided to honor the tiniest trees in the yard with Christmas lights. One tree is so small that even one string of lights was too much. All in all there are seven little trees under four feet tall, and a six foot double tree [...]
A little tip I’ve learned through the years that might help other artists conserve the fast drying acrylic paint. The above photo shows my used palette on top of a new one as I transferred usable paint from the old to the new. Through the years I’ve learned to conserve and save my acrylic paint [...]
Returning from our trip to Juneau and Skagway, Alaska, I was pleasantly surprised to see how much the vegetables in my garden have grown. I spent the greater part of the next day harvesting broccoli, lettuce, parsley and radishes, pulling weeds, training the snap peas to cling to the trellises and watering using our spiffy [...]
A few days ago I listed my basic palette and mentioned that I could not find my favorite color Acra Violet by Liquitex listed anywhere on the Liquitex website, so I submitted my question. Amazingly I received a very complete answer from the product manager, Alexis Dykstra. Here is the scoop taken directly from her [...]
One of the most difficult parts of my job as an artist is managing my photo reference resources. 40 years ago I began with colored snapshots taken with a cheap camera. Today these photos are faded and useless, the negatives stored in shoe boxes. Photo quality improved with a through the lens focus 35mm camera, [...]
Gail Niebrugge (Knee-brew-ghe) born and raised in California has pursued art since childhood, winning a poster contest on the Johnny Jet television show at the age of twelve. Gail began her career as an illustrator for the US Navy and Marines in San Diego, and later established the Instructional Media Center for the Grossmont High School District in La Mesa, California. The Niebrugge family fell in love with Alaska while on vacation in 1976 and never returned home, instead they established a residence and studio in the remote interior settlement of Copper Center where the artist painted … [Read More...]
Wikipedia defines pointillism as; "a style of painting in which small distinct points of primary colors create the impression of a wide selection of secondary and intermediate colors." It goes on to say that the mind and the eye mix the color spots into a full range of tones and that it is closely related to Divisionism. Divisionism was practiced by Georges Seurat during the Neo-Impressionism period. He broke his color into basic elements and painted very small and regular dots. His dots are carefully placed as to not touch each other, so the white under painted canvas shows around all of the dots. I call my painting technique pointillism, but technically it is incorrect according to Wikipedia. The difference between my technique and true pointillism is that I use … [Read More...]