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John Granacki's
Holiday
Art Services
Window Painting 2008!
For the most part I try to work around the edges, on the door(s), in corners, and across the generally-unused upper reaches of large panes. This is especially so for muralistic pieces, such as the full Santa, Sleigh and Reindeer-train, racing across the Moon, although a Nativity with the full entourage (the star & manger at one side, the wise men at the other but headed their way, with the little town of Bethlehem and a short expanse of desert between) can work very well if done narrowly across the bottom of a large window, scaling the corner elements to suit. Prices for my work start in the $25 ballpark for a basic ornamentation motif—something like a pine bough with cones, or a holly wreath with a huge red ribbon, ribboned christmas bells ringing, &c.—scaled to fill the upper half of your door (or equivalent space) perhaps accompanied by a few bits of coordinating bricabrac in the corners of adjacent windows. For those who have window panes above their doors, for a limited time I'm painting ribboned bouquets of mistletoe for just $15! What can I say? I'm a sucker for romance! I even include the little white berries, but mine don't get sticky, nor do they fall off and gum up the carpet the way real mistletoe does. Obviously, prices go up as we add more complicated elements, but this isn't the Louvre, it's window painting, and half of the art is simplicity itself. Consequently when it comes to horses, sleighs, red-nosed reindeer, or cozy snowed-in cabins in the woods—each can be had for but a few dollars more; after all, the style is essentially cartoonish and larger scales are acheived not by greater detail but by larger brushes! "The Wishbook" shown in these photos measures approximately 17-1/2 by 22 inches (the centerspread opening to 51 inches) and within it I've produced samplings of my general window painting technique all rendered at approximately 1/6 to 1/8 scale. My flurry* technique is demonstrated at closer to 1/4 scale, so that the flakes are represented 1-1/2 to 2 times larger than what I intend. Anyhow I've made snowflake stamps from miniature sponges, diligently cutting them out with fine x-acto blades; when I go full-scale on the windows the sponge stamps will be larger, and cut with scissors.
Here's one, at The Bead Merchant: This is mostly a lettering job, and thus more of a sign than a traditional yuletide window painting, per se, but I gave it a seasonal touch, with just a bit of holly (which could conceivably be expanded into a wreath once the sale is over and the lettering scraped off...) Whatever
else happens, don't miss the event! It's The Bead Merchant's
annual 1 DAY ONLY HOLIDAY SALE, December 8, the 2nd Saturday of the
month (it all starts on First
Friday Art Night's morning-after!)
Snow
on the 'shoppe' lettering (or similar) ~ $15, or as little as $5 during a flurry*,
with snowflakes thrown in for FREE! |
for Downtown
Merchants 
A
few basic principles guide my window painting. First
and foremost is that the front window of a store is for the purpose of
showing and
selling merchandise, not for dazzling passers-by with art, which is
merely there to
enhance the commercial display. 
The
buildings illustrated herein are purely fictional and their general
architectural features have been rendered with pencil and pastel
crayon; the paintings illustrated on the windows have been
rendered in the actual paint I use when painting actual windows, and are
thus a fair representation, albeit reduced. As I get more windows painted and photographed, I'll
continue to update this
webpage with photos, along with
information about the businesses where the window paintings are
located...
Snowmen!
