As expected, the painting of the cat piece took about a day. The time frame for these smaller pieces runs pretty consistent. It will take me about an hour or two to mock up the work in Photoshop which doesn’t count looking for reference images that will work together with respect to lighting and angles. The charcoal base layer takes about 7-8 hours. Sometimes, if I am working up a more complicated background than a simple blank wall studio environment, it will take another couple of hours to complete that. After the charcoal, I spray fix the heck out of the thing to seal it. The sealant will darken the work a bit so I’ve now taken to going in and pushing the lighter areas a bit with white colored pencil once everything is dry. After that, I use a heavy gel medium for texture which dries clear. That is usually ready to go in a few hours. After that, I apply acrylic washes, unifying the base colors and shadow colors. On top of that, I start working thicker and drier as I go, picking up more and more of the texture as the piece progresses. Sometimes it can be a little challenging working around the heavy texture to capture details but I think I’m getting better at it. All things being equal, I can bang out one of these smaller works in 48 hours using that process.

I haven’t come up with a name for this little lady yet. I might have to hold off on that until I start work on the novel in earnest. Once I finish Miranda and the Men from Mars, I’ll nail down my premise, probably do a workup on my key characters, lay out a solid three-act structure, and break the story. Outlines seemed to help the last few short scripts I wrote so I might take some time to put that together first. I expect writing the novel will be considerably different from writing for screen but I think the brevity and focus on action and strong visual writing will serve my writing well. Guess we’ll all see. If you’re interested to check out my writing, feel free to check out my writer’s website at https://msanborn.wordpress.com.