Birdwoman

Today I made this tiny little one-hour painting.  Sometimes when I'm working really hard toward a specific goal I can feel my sense of play and whimsy start to slip away.  Making funny little doodles like this help me regain it.
And so do presents!  Today I also received this wonderful gift from Cat and Allan:
She looks far more outraged in the actual photograph than she does in this photograph of the photograph.  This fact is yet another example as to why I really need to invest in a scanner. 

What a coincidence!  Here's another I-should-get-a-scanner example:   

It's my finished bird rack buck.   I spent all last week playing around with this pen, ink and scratchboard technique.  I also received some more great feedback from another art director in children's publishing.  One of her criticisms was basically that my portfolio lacked very specific-seeming characters in specific narrative moments.  She was right, so I started making up parts of stories, writing them down and illustrating them.  It's a really different way of working for me, since I'm always aiming for multiple meanings and ambiguity in my fine art work.  Here are some more experimental pen, ink and scratchboard drawings that I made last week: 

The passage that I wrote for the bird rack buck drawing has sort of taken on a life of its own in my mind.  I keep adding parts to the story and coming up with new characters.  So this weekend I hired my friend's twelve year old daughter to pose for a whole series of images based on this book in my mind.  Not only did she give me the exact poses and expressions I was envisioning, but she also had a lot of really good questions about back story and character development.  Because it appears that this story wants to write itself, whether I have time for it or not.  Sigh...