May 31 work in progress

Bleh! The Gypsy Horse painting looks awful. Too awful to post. *sigh* I really picked the wrong background. It just doesn't suit Aragorn. He's a sweet quiet little guy, and my background is this crazy wild gradation of bold color from deep red to golden orange. It's neato, but it's not him and I hate it. Too busy looking, too "hellish." So, I could go for a more subdued flat red, or completely change and paint it blue. No landscapes, no barns, don't even suggest it! It's just going to be big bold color like the dog paintings. I am debating re-gessoing the whole thing and starting over, even redoing the sketch, but I have to have this DONE by Sunday, so I think I'll see how repainting the background goes tomorrow morning and if I still hate it I'll start over. Sometimes this happens, it's okay, it'll work out in the end. Doesn't help that I lost a day of painting when the well pump went out yesterday (no water!). It's fixed now.

I have been working on the chicken drawing too and now this is getting into kind of a funny situation. The end use of this image will be to scan the bird and drop him into a digital background, so the finished image will be a digital original (to sell as prints, etc). But I'm going to go ahead and finish the work on paper, even though it'll look totally different and have a different title. That's weird, the same bird will be used in two images, I'm having trouble thinking this through! Anyway for years I've wanted to enter chicken art in Draft Horse Classic just for kicks and so I figured this might as well be the one since I'm working on it anyway. I'm trying to keep the background simple, it's not anywhere near done though and that board will probably end up a lot darker.


So this'll be a crazy next few days trying to get this finished up. If worse comes to worse I will hand-deliver my entries. It would only take me three hours round trip to do that... Not my plan but if I had to do that to get them in by the deadline I would.

And finally, some ducks and hens eating watermelon, just for cuteness sake. The duck pics look blue because of the tarp over the top of the coop.