Another (small) painting begins...

I've posted a couple "in progress" photos of this to my FaceBook group, but I wanted to write more about it, here.

This is a brand new "small spider" (5 x 7 inches) painting, and is based on a section of an even smaller (3.5 x 5 inches) pen-and-ink drawing I made last week.

I think it's going well, so far. The background is airbrushed acrylics; the legs are painted using brushes, in oils.

I did very little preliminary drawing on this, (using the smaller pen-and-ink as my reference) and beyond the basic "pose" of the legs, I'm pretty much making this up as I go. The lighting bothers me right now, so I will probably spend some time "tweaking" the shading on the legs, before proceeding further.

I may add colour to the legs, and I may add details to the background; I'm not sure at this point. I like the "skeletal" look of the legs, but they do look a bit more like an underpainting than I prefer. We'll see.

Anyway, here it is, as things stand right now.

Still quite a bit of work still to do...

Slightly more rhan FIve Months to go...

August is rapidly drawing to a close, and I actually feel good about what I've accomplished so far this month. I've been re-drawing The Presentation of Spiders, and I'm pleased at how it's looking. I'm still hoping that the drawing will be finished, transferred to the panel, and I'll be ready to start painting sometime around September 7th.

I'm working the drawing for a "larger" spider painting right now, too. It's going to be (roughly) 24x36 inches, and painted on a honeycombed aluminal panel, that I've primed with Gamblin's Traditional Gesso.

(Several people at my two most recent shows have said they wanted to see some larger spiders...so, I'm planning to make at least three 24x36" spider paintings for the fall!)

Last night, I painted the legs on a small spider painting. (See picture, above...) The background was painted quite earlier this year. I had started painting the spider's body a little later, but I wasn't happy with it. So, I repainted it about a week ago, making it large enough to cover the earlier attempt.

There's going to be a bit of a "surprise" to this painting (the first "hint" of something I'm planning to develop further in several of the next spider paintings);

EDIT: I finished this piece late in 2011, and never got around to taking a "final" photograph of it--and it was sold at the APEX show in March. So, the finished piece doesn't appear at my blog, and I can't post it here as I'd originally promised.

This was sold to a friend, so I should be able to snap a photo of it at some point...but still, I really must be more dedicated about documenting all of my work!