It's been a few days. I've been tied up with a commercial job, but had some time over the weekend to work on one of the initial version's problems with depicting foliage...

Here's one way I'm going to handle it in the second version...

I'm liking the Old Holland medium better and better...

More work on the lower left corner characters' test.




Also more work on the medium. I'm not happy with it. Gets tacky too quickly. I think it is the damar. At any rate, back to the Old Holland medium. I keep coming back to it.

A new test painting with a new medium... For the first version of this area - second version of the painting - I tried increasing the size of the characters by 50%. (see the April 9th entry.) After working the original composition in various ways to accommodate larger characters, it became clear that it just simply was not going to work. The composition would become way too compromised.... so, back to original sizing for the characters... perhaps just a tad larger. This is a new test painting underway...




The Medium: Made a big mixing mistake that seems to have worked out quite well. I purchased some Canada Balsam from Studio Products. it's like a very thick stand oil. I meant to mix a medium with it using 9 parts Damar, 2 parts Canada Balsam and 1 part turpentine. I somehow screwed up my measurements and mixed the formula with 6 parts of Canada Balsam rather then 2... Well... might as well try it out, right... and quite amazingly, I really liked it... :)

The new acending transvestite...

The new acending drinker...

Below is a test detail from the revised drawing for the painting. The first frame shows the 19" x 13" ink jet print glued to a masonite panel using "Yes" glue, and with 5 coats of acrylic matte finish. The second frame shows the panel with a coat of thinned titanium white oil paint to knock back the intensity of the lines and add a small brush stroke texture to the surface. The third frame show the test with oil paint underway.

A digital coloring of part of the in the last post. This is the style I'm going to recreate in oil on the new panel.

I'm definitely going to redo the painting... Start from scratch using the same basic composition, but with a complete redraw of all the characters and probably most of the background...

Here are some of the new characters in the lower left quadrant




A detail: