Complete!

It's done, finished on Tuesday night. Now it just needs a frame, wire, a finishing coat, a print made of the digital pic, some glue to keep the canvas edges from fraying.......maybe it really isn't done yet.

I decided to go for it and added some details to the background, hopefully this will tighten up the composition and keep the painting from looking like a drawing plopped into the middle of a bland expanse of background.

If all goes to plan and my ceiling doesn't cave in, this painting should be complete as of tomorrow night. Keeping fingers crossed....

I've been painting every day lately, with the exception of Wednesday, and as I haven't been posting each time a photo was taken I lost track of the time spent each day painting. Although I know for sure an hour was spent working Thursday, and about six hours today. So, here are the pics:


The obligatory studio shot:


Here is where things stand currently, and where I'm stuck. I'm tempted to push things and add some detail to the background, but would that be overkill? It doesn't really look like an underwater scene yet, but maybe that's not really necessary. Time for a break, and I'll come back to it tomorrow.

Bomb Scare=Productive

So someone called in a bomb threat to the University Teaching Center today, which led to the (not quite so) immediate evacuation of that building and the PCL Library, which is where I work. After only working for one and a half hours we were told to go home and not come back till tomorrow. Hah! Turns out it was an empty threat, but who am I to complain? Especially when there's more time to paint:


After allowing for some serious goofing off I worked for five solid hours today, strictly on the crab body. Onwards to the detail shots....

The weekend

Lots of painting this weekend, starting with making a royal mess out of the background:


And then fixing it. Turns out that after all this work on the background the earlier layers aren't really visible, except in one or two small spots. I'll just chalk those wasted hours up to experimentation.


A few base colors are added to the crab woman's lower anatomy and claws, and the shading is loosely worked out. Then, it's time to start playing colors against one another.

A bit more drawing and painting

Since the last post I've done some work on the drawing itself, and have been working out the shading for the painting. Once again this is unfamiliar territory, normally once the drawing was committed to the canvas I would have just started painting and figured things out on the fly. But, I have to say, having a nearly completed drawing to reference is working out just fine so far.......although, it doesn't feel quite as loose and spontaneous as paintings usually do without a study to refer to. The following photo is after an outlining session last night, and some time spent working on the hair tonight:


This next photo is of my painting area. This isn't the entire studio, but the area dedicated strictly to painting. Also visible is the result of a leaking air conditioning unit from the upstairs neighbor....there has been a lot of water leaking from the ceiling lately, which explains the tarps over my stereo and computer. And the drywall on the ceiling starting to collapse......

More painting progress

This is the drawing of my piece, executed on tracing paper and ready for transfer to the canvas. Normally I would have covered the canvas with brown paper and drawn this full size, and then covered the reverse of the drawing in graphite. The entire drawing is then heavily traced while taped into place, which transfers it to the canvas. This is laborious and time-consuming though, and now that I'm in the possession of an overhead projector it seemed like the time to try a simpler approach.


The drawing after transfer to the canvas, it isn't too visible in this photo but it's there.


This version of the background is after a few more layers of paint from the previous post. Once I really got going though I stopped paying attention to how long I was spending on each step. And who knows how much time was spent on the drawing itself. Also, I'd like to thank Tori for agreeing to be my model for this, especially after all the contortions I put her through to get just the right pose.