Hoping for a Productive Week Ahead...

Easter Vacation is officially here!  The girls finished up their classwork today and we all have a break for the next week (from school, anyway).

The new painting is underway and surprisingly farther along than I thought!  Earlier this week, I started with a pencil drawing which I painted over and refined with burnt umber - I wanted to take the time to get the proportions right.

Happy to have a use for leftover mural mixtures!

I realized that I had several color mixes leftover from the mural - some that I had mixed in quantity and kept in airtight containers - that would actually work with this painting.  Some will need to be adjusted slightly, but they were well suited for the underpainting portion of the project.  Sooooo, I was able to get started.

Underpainting underway...

BUT, I hesitate to say that this painting will go quickly, even with all of my studies and pre-mixed colors.  I've done that before and there's always something that I get hung-up on that extends the project for a while.  I can still hope, though, and I do know that the time I took with the studies has helped me a lot.  After all, it's a complicated pose, especially when it comes to the tilt and angle of the head - I fought with that one a while.  But, I was much more comfortable with it when drawing it out on the canvas (all freehand - no projector for this).

Meanwhile, while mom's busy painting in the garage, my youngest 2 have found a way to entertain themselves before the weather turns.  I'm not sure if this is a rain dance, but...

Back to Work...

After a wonderful Easter Vacation where I was able to spend big chunks of the day working on the mural, an unexpectedly extended trip out of town and the start of schoolwork again makes it feel like I've been away from the mural for a long time.  We found out as we drove into Lancaster (after 4 hours in the Friday downpour) that all the State Cup games had been moved from Saturday to Sunday - soooooo, since we were already there, we ended up staying longer than planned.

Not quite there...but closer.  Photos can help you see
flaws that you didn't notice when you were working on it

Today, I had a full day of CoOp, art classes, mom-taxi, and dinner-making, but I was determined to get out to the garage and at least make some adjustments.  In my last post, I explained how the scale of the toasting figures was a bit on the wimpy side.  So, this evening I figured I'd start reworking the proportions.  Not only did the figures have to change, but so did the barrel.  To understand the changes made, if you look at the male figure, the top point of the hair of the original guy fell just below the jawline of the current guy.  In other words, he gained a whole head in height.

Cheers - his chin's a bit skinny, but I'll fix that...

It's very "cartoon-ish", but I'm just trying to get the shapes the way I want them.  It's not quite there, but it's closer than it was.  And, having to draw this out REALLY made me appreciate the projector I had at the beginning. I was constantly stepping back to see how it actually looked and it made me wonder how Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling - it's not like he could easily take a step back every few minutes to see if the proportions were right.  And, he did not have the luxury of a projector to transfer his design.  My hat is definitely off to those Basilica-painting masters!

4 Down - 1 To Go

Illustration #4, again, would be a decent 1st draft. I like the proportions of the foreground figure (for the most part). But, there are several things that I would adjust if I had time to do it again.

He got up to the shed and almost screamed as he almost walked right into the path of an armed guard. But, he realized the guard was asleep.

As I'm rapidly running out of time - we leave for Disneyland tomorrow afternoon - I'm working even more quickly and letting things go that I normally might spend more time on. But, I still have one more drawing to do, laundry to put away, suitcases to pack, dogs to bathe...

Illo #1 and Lessons Learned

Working on the illos for my son's short story has been quite educational. While it's not a "real" illustration commission, it's given me a sense of what working on a job might be like. I've completed a few drawings in pen/ink. One of them is shown here (critiques welcome):

Suddenly the laughter at the table stopped for everyone was curious about what Jake had to say.

I'm not 100% thrilled about this picture. I started with this one and it's probably the most difficult of the 5. There are several people of different ages - requiring different proportions. They are all seated around a dinner table - requiring lots of "clutter" among the people and lots of legs beneath. I didn't have anything to look at, so I just had to work it out in my head (I did have my son model the hands for "Jake").

This has been very eye-opening, and I've learned many things about the whole process. Such as...

1) Make sure you have lots of time before the deadline to do - and redo - and redo - until you're totally satisfied.

2) This will be the final product for his assignment, but it's really just a 1st draft (after those sketchbook studies) of the entire composition. Now, I see all kinds of issues that I would change if I were to be doing this for a publisher.

3) I have a tendency to shorten legs - one of those proportion issues - but I've dealt with that a little better in drawings 2 and 3 (to be shown later).

4) Lighting is a bit of a mystery to me - I would have liked to enhance this image with effects of the lighting they would have had during that era (candles). But, I didn't have time to explore that and I would prefer to have something to directly observe.

5) Historical fiction is not my 1st choice of genre to illustrate - certainly not with a 1 week deadline! It's another layer added to the illustration - having to think of period correctness of costumes and props. More to think about and research.