When Bitter is sweet.

Returned to Bitter, the painting I was working on before I went to the dogs. heh.
Painted the silver spoon, the hypo needles and the draperies. I could not put a brush stroke wrong. It felt so right. I remembered how much I love doing still lifes.



I've decided that a problem painting is like the out of control kid in an otherwise easy going group. The difficult kid gets 80% of the attention just to keep him from biting someone's ear or setting fire to the drapes, and all the good kids get a little distracted attention and mostly benign neglect. The result of my musing is that my troubled painting is currently in time out so I can spend some quality time with my good paintings.

Tomorrow I'll be photographing a rawhide bone to add to Visit the Prisoner and painting in the floor drain.

Bitter, and Corporal Works of Mercy

I'm still painting along on Bitter. Worked on the big sugar bowl yesterday. If you look closely you can see a falling lump of sugar. Think I will add one more cube teetering on the rim.

Now back to doing large to-scale drawings for the next series. I've done the principle photography for the series, based on the Catholic church's seven corporal works of mercy; shelter the stranger, clothe the naked, visit the sick, minister to prisoners, feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, and bury the dead.

Here's my plan; Cavalier dogs plus one prop. Each CWOM per 24 x 30" canvas. Dogs will be nearly life size, the props will be cropped and in a corner.

I've taken hundreds of photos over the last few days. I winnowed them down to 14-18 per category, and have made myself a kind of contact sheet. I've been picking out the elements that work best for each.

I'm going at this from a new direction technically - instead of transferring the image by grid from the photo to the canvas, I'm going to project the photo, draw the outline and a few other elements with pencil, and then finish the sketch working directly from the photo. Once I'm satisfied with that, I'll start painting.

I plan to do a ambiguous neutral colored background. The supporting surface is going to be simple and stylized, though I haven't figured out exactly how that is going to work. The table tops I used are light maple color.

I borrowed a Blenheim yesterday, so it's not all Moochie, my black & tan cavalier. I also got great photos of wolves from my bio-sister that I am going to try to use.

Silver sugar bowls and hypodermics

Here's my work today - the little sugar bowl and needles. I also put another layer on the deep background, and fiddled with the tint of the sugar cubes. Just the insulin bottle, then some drying time, and I can start deepening and refining.

Bitter

Bitter is all about my complicated relationship with sugar. As in Dixie Crystal, not kisses. Worked on the drape swag across the top, plus the handcuffs and sugar cubes.


Sugar bowls, silver spoon, and insulin bottle tomorrow. Yum.