Ron Cole's Zanesville, Ohio Art Sponsorship Program

About Ron Cole

Ron Cole is a professional artist, designer, and businessman from Los Angeles, California. His accomplishments from a young age include co-hosting a nationally syndicated television program, working as the staff artist for a global magazine, and designing photo-etched industrial products - all while still in high school. In Los Angeles, Ron worked for many years in the film industry as a model maker, character designer, and artist. Ron also designed and constructed working models and prototypes for the toy industry, most notably for Mattel's 'Hot Wheels' and 'Barbie My Scene's' lines. Working in the aerospace industry, Ron built both scale and full size working models for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), McDonnell Douglas, and other large companies. As a 3D modeler and 2D artist, Ron helped bring to life many resorts and high rises in Las Vegas, including the High Roller Ferris wheel at the LINQ. Before going into business for himself, Ron was a senior director with Pittsburgh's Davison Design's 'Inventionland'. In 2008, he founded HiDef Design and Cole's Aircraft art. Choosing to focus primarily upon his fine art experience, by 2015, Cole's Aircraft had grown into the world's largest single-artist 'aviation/historical art' web store with over 35,000 followers on Facebook.      

Shortly after finding a new home in Zanesville, Ohio in 2012, Ron opened his first brick-and-mortar gallery in the city's historic downtown Masonic Temple Building. In 2016, he opened Gallery Luminaria in the same building. Renovated to 'bring a little LA' to the location, the new space focuses both upon his own work and provides a bright and inviting place for other area artists to display their work. Events are held regularly, including participation in Zanesville's First Friday Art Walk, where there is always music, food & drinks, and a good crowd. 

Sponsorship Program (Gallery Luminaria)

Besides the running of his business, Ron Cole hopes to provide opportunities to new and aspiring artists in the Zanesville, Ohio area. His gallery provides a large, bright, space in a central location, just off Interstate 70 and located between the county courthouse and city hall. 

Ron's Gallery Luminaria sponsorship program is unique in Zanesville, as Ron not only provides space in his gallery but also promotes the sponsored work of others online. "I show people how to create a brand; how to look professional, create a Facebook Page, sponsor ads, reach their audiences, design logos and stand out." Ron also photographs and professionally retouches images, and scans and digitizes 2D artwork from which Giclee' prints can be created or shared online. "I create all of my own prints in-house (up to 24x48 inches, on paper or canvas). I offer that as a service, part of my program, to the artists I sponsor. I also frame some of their favorites to show." Nobody else offers so much, and the cost to the sponsor is nothing. "If one of my sponsored artists sells a framed piece of theirs that I made for them, in my gallery or elsewhere, I'll only ask to be compensated for the cost of the frame."

The Gallery Luminaria program is intended to help launch new careers for its participants, and doesn't stop at one gallery showing or single event. "There is so much talent here, and I don't know how many times I'll talk to someone, see their work, and know they could be doing something more with it if that's their true desire. 

In the near future, Ron plans to add new perks to his program, including an online store devoted to selling the works of other area artists - both original paintings and prints - following the business model of his own stores. 

Contact

If you are interested in talking to Ron Cole about his art or his gallery program, feel welcome to call or email at any time, and all are welcome to visit and experience Gallery Luminaria every first Friday of every month in the Masonic Temple Building - from 5:00 to 8:30 pm - on the 4th floor. 

More about Gallery Luminaria 

Email Ron Cole

Call: 330.883.2493

Ron Cole's 'Cole's Aircraft' Web Store

Gallery Luminaria on Facebook

Ron Cole's Big 40x60 Gallery-Wrapped Canvases

The genre' of aviation art is changing dramatically. In my personal opinion it's all for the better. New technologies are opening up new processes that are empowering more artists to share their visions with others. That can only be good. And what fans of our art expect from us is changing, too. Realism, drama, mood and the size of a composition are seeing limits pushed to the edge of what's possible. That's exciting, and challenging as an artist. All good. 

I've always been seen as a bit 'nuts' when it has come to including arguably unnecessary detail in my own creations. I did it as a builder of scale models and it's equally true of my paintings. Can anyone really see the pattern of the dress the woman is wearing inside the open door of my Boeing 314 Clipper? Certainly not when being viewed as a 13x19 or even 24x36 Giclee' print; certainly not on any computer screen short of full-resolution with a zoom feature. But it is there, though rarely appreciated. Details like that are within every one of my 100+ compositions. They're time consuming to include, but they're part of my style. 

It recently became in vogue to make huge prints and wall art a part of modern home decor. Everyone has seen the big online 'art' clearinghouses advertise them. But no photography and virtually no art was ever created with sizes like these in mind. Look at them closely in person, as opposed to those tiny ad images on Facebook, and there is fuzzy pixelation everywhere! They're terrible. And the companies that sell such junk don't care, since by the time it's obvious you've already bought it and unpacked it. 

Only the size is impressive when a composition, meant to be printed as a 20x30, is blown up to twice that size. 

Fortunately, at least in this particular case, I'm nuts. I've always exceeded the need when it came to sharpness and detail. What was probably a waste of time in years past is now a great asset and presents an opportunity. Now there is a popular and usually practical size that I can offer people that really shows off my work and sets it apart from anything else out there on the market: the 40x60 inch gallery-wrapped canvas. 

The rivet detail on my Amelia Earhart Lockheed Electra really pops when seen as a 40x60 

Unlike all of my other offerings that I produce in my own studio, these 40x60s are outsourced to an incredibly reliable and quick-to-ship company that specializes in these pieces. That makes them expensive for me to have made, but I'm happy to make less myself in order to share my work this way. The canvas is gloss, and somewhat to my surprise it creates a beautiful depth to the image - especially with saturated colors. The canvas is wrapped around an extra-thick and solid wooden frame. The thickness of the frame creates a natural stand-off from the wall, giving the piece a three-dimensional look. The edging of the wrap is gloss black, which amplifies that effect even more.

These days folks are much less inclined to want to buy art, wait to receive it, then take it to a framer, pay more money for wrapping or matting, then wait more, and finally receive something that they can hang on their wall. My 40x60s (and indeed all of my work in all of the sizes I offer) come ready to hang with a variety of hardware to accommodate anyone's needs. Take them out of the (admittedly big) box and hang them. That's it. Instant gratification! 

 

All of my 100+ compositions are still available in this size, though a few of my most popular pieces are close to sold out. 

Shop my store, or just enjoy taking a look at what I have to offer: Cole's Aircraft

- Ron Cole 

P-51 Mustang 'In All its Glory' Painting, by Ron Cole

I love painting obscure historical subjects. As a professional artist, that can be a real vice. Anyone familiar with this aircraft from the early 1930s?

Yes! It's the vaunted Mitsubishi Type 10 giant carrier-based triplane torpedo bomber. The Japanese built a few of them in concert with Sopwith before realizing it was too big to operate from aircraft carriers. It's weird and ugly. I love it. I painted it. I've never sold a print. 

Thankfully, from a business point of view, I also love painting beautiful things. Somewhere along the line, after having painted over 100 compositions in 8 years, I realized that I'd never covered the most popular and historically significant subject within my genre' - the P-51D Mustang. It was hard to work it into my busy schedule between commissions, but I wanted to do it and do it right; with an unusual attention to detail. From the start I knew I wanted to focus on the natural beauty of the machine, without being distracted by unit markings and fancy nose art, so it would be a 'naked' bird as it would have appeared fresh from the factory in 1944, and with a bit more reflectivity across its aluminum skin than would have been common in reality (Maybe someone at North American had some time on their hands, and polishing compound). Put her in a beautiful environment and let it bounce off of her elegant lines. 

And that's what I did. 

  

I think it's wonderful that these aircraft were hastily built under pressure. They're imperfect. Too often artists paint them (and scale modelers construct them) displaying Swiss-watch-like precision. Panel lines wavered. Sheet metal wrinkled. Rivets didn't line up. And all of those quirks are magnified when everything is polished. It's also harder to render an imperfect surface than it is to pretend all was smooth and uniform. How do I get it right when I do get it right? By studying the real thing and photographs of the real thing. A fastener distorts the metal surrounding it in a very specific and predictable way. Two rivets close together will effect each other while two more distant rivets won't. For me it helps to have pieces of these aircraft lying around - but you get the idea. 90% of the process is observation. The remainder is painting what you saw.  

   

Having converted this composition into the digital realm, and since this aircraft was rendered without unit markings, I saw an opportunity to create variations based upon the original work. Very often I get requests for specific aircraft flown by specific pilots, or aircraft belonging to certain units. I can't always accommodate those requests, but I could here. Here are a few that have been born recently:

I hope you enjoy my work! Limited edition prints and open edition posters are still available for some of these renditions. Visit my web store: Cole's Aircraft

- Ron Cole

Going Nuts With Polished Metal Finishes

Polished metal is one of the hardest things for an artist to paint. There are several good reasons for this: the reflective surface immediately multiplies the complexity of a composition by revealing its otherwise out-of-frame environment, it changes the rules of light and shadow, and it makes otherwise invisible variations in a surface key characteristics of its visible properties. In short, a 100 hour project instantly becomes a 400 hour project if it has to be painted to portray convincing polished metal.

As I use both by-hand and digital painting tools to create most of my work, I've used both to experiment with painting this tricky surface. One thing that I confirmed right away was that digital painting (to be set apart from digital rendering, which is something created by software as opposed to being painted by hand using digital tools) was a terrible way to create a convincing polished metal effect. The reason: digital tools that lay down color are too uniform and precise. A digital tool will paint a perfect circle or a line without 'error'. Good for some things, but looking at the nose of Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra (above) there are no perfect circles or perfect lines in evidence. While not as organic as a tree, it's still very random and free from most patterns. A brush in one's hand is the perfect tool for what's organic, as the innumerable variations that come into play as its color is laid down create their own pleasantly imperfect character. Two brush painted rivets will not be alike, and a distorted reflection in a metal panel created by those two rivets will likewise not take on an undesirable pattern. But while digital tools are bad at organics, hand tools are bad at the very thing that digital tools are good at - precision. Brushes leave brush strokes, and a convincing polished metal surface has a very fluid appearance which brush strokes tend to ruin.

     
 

My answer, as with most painting challenges I take on, has been to blend the two media together, playing to the unique strengths of both digital tools and hand tools. The polished aluminum skin of this YP-37 (above) reflects very contrasting colors. Everything you see was first put down by brush. During that process I regulated the 'shake' of my hand to break up lines and form (the human brain, like a computer's, wants to create patterns - which we have to consciously suppress as artists). Dimples around a line of flush rivets are unavoidably unique thanks to my hand's imprecision, as they would be on the actual aircraft. But the end result is not fluid. Of course it looks painted. I can see where brush strokes start and stop, and those are all bad attributes when realism is the objective.

But then I do something weird by traditional art standards: I import my brush painted work into the digital realm. Once there my painting exists within a different world that doesn't know the limiting characteristics of acrylic paint (like drying times) or the obnoxious qualities of paper (like becoming overworked). My surface is essentially a liquid that I can distort and blend at will with custom tools that I've created. A flick of the wrist with one tool blurs away brush strokes, while a careful shimmy along a line between two contrasting colors will cause that line to blend with precise control. A reflection near a rivet may have a vary sharp quality, while the reflection's characteristics may soften as it traverses the flatter surface area towards the next rivet. I can also grab some 'sky' and use a digital brush the add it atop a rivet in a 'red' area, then 'fuzz it out' as the hemispherical rivet contorts the reflection of the sky across its surface.

I think you get the idea.

Sometimes it's fun, within the digital realm, to imagine a tool dropped by some 1930s-era aircraft mechanic onto the aluminum skin of a wing fillet. I can use a tool to 'squish' that reflection to portray a vague dent. Also, I can mask off a particular panel and imagine that, for whatever reason, the alloy there had taken on a very light degree of surface corrosion - just enough to desaturate the colors in the reflection and blur its lines in relation to panels around it. Markings painted atop the natural metal might have been matte, satin, or gloss. The YP-37 sported gloss marking in its day with their own reflection's distinctive qualities from the surrounding polished metal. High gloss red, for example, will surrender some of its saturation when reflecting a deep blue sky.

 

I can't say that I've quite mastered these techniques, but I'm progressing with each new composition. Besides the processes that I've described, I will say that 70% of all art is actually observation. It almost drives me crazy now, as it's impossible for me to stand in front of a meticulous P-51 Mustang in the bright sun and appreciate it as a whole. Instead my eye is drawn immediately to its details: how flush rivets interact with the skin as opposed to raised rivets; how some raised rivets have tiny indentations in their middles while others don't; how heat effects different alloys; how skin thickness changes the way it is distorted near its edges. But, it does pay off when it comes to duplicating such things with paint - be that paint of a chemical or digital nature, or both.

- Ron Cole