Working title: Marmot
12 x 12 ", Acrylic on Canvas
1 July 2008
I can't seem to get marmots off my mind. I started painting one early this morning. I'm still in the underpainting stage, obviously.
20 July 2008
I put some color on today...I'm being fairly literal about it. I've been struggling with what I should do about surface treatment: whether I should go for bold brushwork or whether I should block in big flat areas, maybe with painted boundaries between them. I'm leaning towards the bold brushwork idea, as that's something I need to practice. Either way, I think there'll be few if any other items appearing on this painting; it'll be a fairly simple, straightforward composition.
But I like marmots, so maybe I'll do more paintings of 'em and try out different things...
8 April 2009
Apparently, I'm a slow painter. I've been bugged by the drawing problems in the previous version for a while; they make the poor critter look like a Gund teddy bear. So I worked on it over a couple of sessions recently. There's still a few problems, such as the eyes, but overall it seems much better to me...more marmotlike.
I haven't bothered with getting the color right while I'm working on the drawing. Perhaps I should've done more drawing work while in the formal underpainting stage. This is still informally an underpainting, as more of it will get painted over. It's not what I consider to be a more traditional underpainting, though: one with colors to contrast the final ones and make them pop, or one with more "background" colors for the final image.
The dullness of the new green bits annoys me; I will probably attack that in the next session. The problem with having over a year between sessions is that I've forgotten what yellow I used in the background green, and I lost my notes. So I'll have to guess, or test different ones out to see if I can figure it out.
9 April 2009
All I did this time was to overpaint the green. Even using the handy-dandy green chart that I had made, I didn't get the colors the same, and got a less-yellowy result. I think I liked the yellower version, so it'll get painted again. At least now it's not distractingly disjointed green, like the last version.
