Day 2

Little Pumpkin and Skull

(6x8", Oil) Price: $75.00

Sorry for the canvas texture on the image, but the scanner insists on highlighting the crossweave, and with the canvas being so small, it's hard to get rid of. I'll work on that. Meanwhile...

I made a mistake with this little chap: I started way too late at night - nearly 10pm - and chose a subject that was something more of a challenge than I realised. I always like to spend quality time painting skulls, if I have to paint them at all, because there's something intrinsic in them that I have trouble translating into paint. Not sure why. This isn't a real skull, anyway. It's a two inch souvenir that my husband picked up when we visited Kents Cavern in Torquay, England last year. Now he really LOVES skulls, and has no trouble painting them at all!

The other problem was the pumpkin. It's one of those mini ones that make great decorations throughout the Fall. However, last year I didn't get to choose the pumpkins myself. So although it's the colour I wanted, the shape wasn't quite 'it'. I persevered until midnight and called it quits because I was getting really sleepy. The painting itself is what I call third-stage-finished - if it had been a real painting created over a few days instead of just a few hours, this would have been the underpainting. An0ther couple of two hour sessions would turn it into a much finer result. However, it's just a sketch, and I'm just getting the hang of this.

Lessons learned:

1. Don't start painting too late in the evening.
2. Don't start painting a complicated subject too late in the evening, unless I'm planning on working on it again the next day.
4. Block off the secondary light source on the other side of the easel, so it doesn't add a backlight to the subject - unless I really intend it to be there, of course.
3. Gesso and sand the canvas supports so they'll be smoother to work on, and to scan.

See you tomorrow,
Marianne