Pencil Thief

 

Alas

During our yearly drawing session at the river, my excellent friend Molly told me about how Maxfield Parrish used to get those glowing effects in his paintings by layering transparent glazes between layers, so I thought I'd try it with this new image. It's not working so great, because the paint isn't absorbing into the surface well enough and is pooling up. I may have to sand that area down to make this canvas work.

 

Life Skills

I know it seems like I've been lazy, but I have actually been up to a few things besides recharging. The first picture is my first attempt at mortising for a hinge. Not so good.

The second one was much better. I did five in all, after combining a few YouTube videos into

a process I could manage with the tools that I had:

Once again, I feel like my carpentry skills are lacking, and I should do something about it. I think I am going to look for a teacher.

 

New Kitten

How she tucks me in:

 

Calling it

Well, I have another couple of images I want to work on, and knowing my recent record for not finishing things, I tore into this one yesterday, and I'm willing to call it done. The ellipses continued to haunt me right up until the last minute. If I start making noise about doing that again, I hope some kind soul will remind me what a pain they are.

 

Mistakes were made, but I learned something

I think I'm going to call it on this little print, because I'm realizing that the roofing tin I"m using will never allow a brighter value. It's easy to scratch into, and some mistakes can be smoothed out, but I don't think I'll ever get the value range I'm looking for. I've started another print on a steel plate leftover from my Solarplate days. In the meantime, I might try to add some color to this one with Prismacolor colored pencils. The buckets of blood will look much better in red, right?

 

All the elements

As far as I can tell, all of the elements are in, although I still don't know exactly what I'm going to do with the blue squares. It's all still pretty rough. I'm remembering the time my prof told me that my work looks terrible until it doesn't. Truth.