Feb 21 work in progress

Criminy, how did it get so late again.


More work on the background today. The entire top area will be fairly dark graphite too, except for the lights, and there will be some gradation overall so it's not entirely one color and overly dark. The darkness concerns me a little, but... I think it'll be okay. So, why did I not do the background first if I knew all along what it would be? It's always tempting. I mean, the bird is the most fun part of the art, so why not get the rest of it out of the way. If the whole thing was in colored pencil I might have been able to get away with that. But graphite is very slick and very smudgy, and if I'd gotten smudgy parts on the undrawn bird area, it would have been hard to color over. Of course that just means I now have to be exceedingly careful not to smudge the background onto the bird! The background tone will have to be adjusted to fit the bird, which is another reason I didn't want to just block in a dark background right away. I may have to lighten or darken bits and pieces of the background to really make it work. It's not done... and likely won't be done this week, darn it! If I didn't have litho tomorrow I could maybe pull it off but oh well. The foreground is not done either, there is going to be shadowing around the legs and more color brought into the flat gray area. This is a difficult piece. Maybe the smart thing would have been to make the bird white, but dang I love the spangled color! :-)

I also spent a couple hours framing today. I don't talk about framing much but I do a fair amount of custom framing. It's very satisfying to be able to frame my own work for clients, I like being the one to decide how the work will be displayed! So these are three pairs of Standard drawings that are being delivered this weekend. Pardon Olin, the photo that he didn't walk into was blurry so I had to use this one.