August 24 work in progress, etc.

Tonight I went on a very strange trail ride. :-) There is a "horse trail" (a multi-use trail, walkers, cyclists, dogs...horses I think are a rarity on this trail) that goes through part of Elk Grove. My friend WM (whee, she has new initials!) and some of her family and friends have this tradition of riding to Starbucks on Sundays. I was invited to go along, and so I did. It's maybe a 3 mile round trip. Shylah was pretty good, kinda grumpy today with a few spooky moments. It's way different than riding on the road where I live! It's pretty silly riding a horse through a drive-thru. :-) Several of my friends showed up with cameras, so I will have pics to post by the end of the week.

I definitely need to desensitize Shylah to "throwing things away" as she nearly unseated me when I tossed my empty cup into a trash can as we rode past. So I'll be taking trash cans and buckets out to the round pen and an armload of clanky things like empty pop cans to throw away. I have a few non-horse-owning friends who would actually like to go riding with me. There are two issues here. One is that I have only one rideable horse. I have access to an extra horse (Dusty!) but would not in a hundred million years put a newbie on Dusty, which means Shylah would need to be the sensible horse. She generally is, but I know some things that need work. The other problem is lack of a truck and trailer so I pretty much need to get a little group of totally sane dependable trail horses together so I can mooch rides anyway. :-)

So, in the world of art this weekend... did not work on the bear scrim, I wanted a few days off from that. Weekends tend to be kinda scattered and I want uninterrupted hours for that. I did sand down a Corian tile for an upcoming horse scrim. I still need to sketch the image though. It's a really extremely complicated image (two horses in harness).

I started Nude #4, which I think will be titled Beach Babe or something cheesy like that. Right now it looks like absolutely nothing, yeah!

I am disgruntled with the landscape drawing again. I'm tired of working on the sky, though sometimes I'm totally thrilled with it. It's just taking a lot more layers than I anticipated and kind of dragging on and on. The pink/orange parts are almost done, the reds and purples and blues still need a lot of work. I'm eager to get to the foreground! I need to get this at least pretty close to done early this week so I can order a frame.

Uncompleted sketch for upcoming 12x18" graphite drawing. I'd like to have this done by DHC but I'm not sure I can pull that off.

Ummm, I think that's about it. Oh! I took some hummingbird photos. These are both female Black Chinned Hummingbirds. Could be the same bird, who knows.