Friday, November 11, 2011

November 10 work in progress




Not the prettiest stopping point tonight, but my wrist says "time to stop!!!" and one does not ignore one's wrist when it says such things (besides, it's after midnight). I'm going to say this side is more difficult, for two reasons. The first is that his face is mostly in shadow from the brim of the hat. So this will all look better and make more sense when I finish. The side of his face (that would be his left cheek) will be a whole lot darker than what you see now. As I said, wrist said go to bed, I obey... The second thing is that this piece of ivory has a lot of variation on it, and the other side didn't. So the real dark looking ivory, sort of a figure-8 shape next to his mouth, that's REALLY soft. The dots end up bigger, so with the same dot-coverage it'll look even darker when inked. The wide light-colored swath of ivory that runs down his cheek is very hard, so the dots look smaller. I have to compensate for this, giving some area less or more dots even when it seems contrary to what I ought to be doing.

Okay, time to go dream about poking dots...

2 comments:

Bob Easton said...

Looking great! and Thanks for the little treatise on handling the variations in the ivory.

I'm curious. Maybe I missed it earlier. Is this work for a specific collector or for a firearms company? It would be interesting to know the thinking behind the choice of generals.

Katherine Plumer said...

This is for a specific collector, so the choice in generals was entirely his.