July 24 work in progress

Well, you'll get to see this one from the way way early stages, since this is as far as I got on it today. The outlines show up more than normal for two reasons: 1) different paper 2) dark subject. I first sketched this out on cheap paper until I was satisfied with the composition, and then used the lightbox to trace that sketch onto the expensive paper. It's just basic outlines and contours right now.


"Jessie" (black labrador)
8x9 inches
(will be) graphite and charcoal on velour paper (Oooo!)
not for sale
These WIP scans won't be good, it doesn't fit well on the scanner

Jessie is one of our family dogs. I did Nellie's portrait years ago and have always meant to do one of Jessie. She's really getting old and creaky and lately I just have this feeling that it's time to do this... It was hard to pick a photo on which to base this. There were two I really liked. In the other she looked very serious and somber, which she often does, but I decided I wanted to portray the happy "let's go hunt rats!" expression. She is, after all, my good hunting buddy!

In other news, the horses FINALLY got their feet trimmed this afternoon, a month late. So the geldings will go home soon, and Shylah will also go to JJ's house for a while to get used to seeing all the traffic along the highway. That should help with her road-desensitization! And it's not far away so I can go over and ride in the big fields and trails there, how fun! In about a month Shylah is going way north to spend 30 days with JC for some fine tuning training, more trail experience, and just kind of well rounding her experiences more. I think it'll be good for her to spend some time with a human other than me, and around horses other than Gwen and the occasional geldings. I am already super excited about spending a week up there in the fall trail riding. :-)

I am looking into getting into another art medium, a really entirely different thing. I'm not going to elaborate just yet, I need to do loads of practice with this new thing and possibly shell out some big bucks for new equipment, which is painful, but I'm optimistic. It has the potential to be a great deal more profitable than what I'm doing now, and that's enormously tempting (one can only "hang in there" so long before one goes broke!). It also has the potential to be something that I'm REALLY going to like, which is exciting. So.. keep an eye out, time will tell....