The painting of the arctic fox for my annual holiday card came together with a little work. The dress color kept changing. I began with a bright red fabric but found it overpowering and so dialed it back to a warm yellow-orange with hints of reds and a red accent sash. As with many of my paintings, I would I had to keep pushing more and more white to make it feel properly illuminated. I also pushed the contrast in the foreground chair. It helped to add a little space. The atmospheric perspective in the room is pretty negligible but just that little bit helped. The texture proved to be a bit of a challenge in the face. The mouth was particularly tricky, getting that right with the heavy texture fighting me. Still, all in all, I feel like I captured the feeling I wanted. As with the other holiday cards, I wrote a little hint fiction. This one went over the 50-word count I was trying to keep to. I expect the count is more in keeping with the spirit of brevity and surgical word and information choice so going a bit over felt okay.

Warm Meat Pies and Apples
Charity always delighted in the first snow of the season. Delicate crystals drifted from the heavens, frosting windows and collecting in soft mounds. The world’s fresh linens draped over the contents of the summer den. The sight conjured visions of her days as a cub, frolicking in the crisp air with her sisters. Soon they would arrive with warm meat pies and apples, driving away the silence and filling her home with lively conversation and cheer.

I don’t have any expectations of including Charity in my book but that might change once I get deeper into the writing. I am enjoying the back and forth play between the small bits of character building in the writing. I love how they emerge from the imagery and, afterward, help influence the interpretation of the imagery right back. These characters start to take on a life in my mind, playing out tiny vignettes. Hopefully, I will find the opportunity to do them all justice and write flash fiction for each of the paintings. With each new painting, their world grows more complex.

I finished the charcoal value pass for our arctic fox Christmas card. This one was a challenge due to the fact that I decided to work fairly small and didn’t take the time to sand down my gesso as much as I could have. The gesso application on the canvas was a little thick and the horizontal brush texture posed some issues achieving a finer level of detail in a few spots. Next time I’ll have to make sure my smaller canvases are sanded down more. There are times when I really appreciate the added texture but not so much on the smaller works. It took a little more time but I was able to get the base values refined to a point where I was comfortable moving forward. Once I spray-fixed the charcoal, I did go in after with a white and black colored pencil to push in a little more refinement.

I decided to go with the arctic fox for the Christmas painting this year. I did an exhaustive search of winter animals and the fox jumped out at me. I’m currently rolling around a bit of flash fiction in my head to accompany the piece. I’m thinking of her likening the snow on the ground with fresh linens covering the furniture of the summer home, protecting it until the spring. I’m not sure if I will include her in my final novel dealing with the animals but you never know. I generally complete the paintings and then let them speak to me, telling me about who the character is. If it fits in the story, I’ll work it in.

You might be wondering why, if I end working in colored pencil now, why not just work in colored pencil or graphite instead of charcoal. I have found that charcoal has some really excellent properties, particularly in showcasing lighting effects and gradual shifts in value. I also like how easy it is to tone a large canvas with a compressed charcoal stick. The work I do in colored pencil is pretty minimal at the end anyway. I expect that, for me, it will always be charcoal.

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.

In honor of my birth-mother’s up-coming birthday, I decided to jump back into my animal paintings and work up another cat. It is great to be back painting after almost a year away. Completing my Master’s in Creative Writing was fantastic and, while I’m now much better prepared to write Miranda’s children’s book and the novel dealing with the animals I’ve been painting, I did miss working in charcoal and paint. Here is the charcoal value pass on canvas and I hope to complete the painting in another day or so. It took a little while to get the feel for the charcoal again after not working with it for a bit. Before, this probably would have taken me maybe 4-5 hours. This time, I spent 2 days. I’ve been known to rush things and I didn’t want my return to the medium to be sloppy, especially since this one is going to my mother.

The size of this painting is roughly 6″ by 8″.  I am finding some variation in the canvas sizes I buy from what they are labelled. The differences aren’t huge, but the actual scale can vary by 1/4 of an inch or so. I should start bringing a ruler with me to the art supply store. I’m going to keep these works fairly small as that seems to be the size that moves locally and I would love to have more of these on other people’s walls as opposed to my own.

I’m really happy that my taking part in the creative writing master’s program still allowed me enough time to complete my annual holiday card. This year I took a break from the usual panel of the Franklin and Nunu book and decided to go with one of my animal paintings. I’ve pretty much maintained my pace on the smaller paintings, even with the increased focus on the environments. This beaver took me a day to pull the reference images, piece together the Photoshop mockup, complete the charcoal base values, and apply the gel medium. The next day I finished about 90 percent of the washes and drybrushing. I did take a little extra time the following day to push the lighting further (thanks to Nicholas Boyd for the critique) but overall, two days of work seems to be fairly consistent.

On this painting I decided I wanted to depart from my usual cool blue and teal shadows and push a warmer deep red tone to unify the piece. I thought, with the candle light, it would make for a warmer, cozier environment and would pop well against the cool white backlighting from the window.

I’m getting back to my animal paintings again. This is one of the benefits of having a few projects going on at once. I get to cycle through projects maintaining good interest and energy. When I start to burn out a bit I can shift my attentions onto a different project. This squirrel has been sitting around my studio for months begging me to finish the painting stage. I finished the charcoal on canvas stage a while ago, spray-fixed the work, applied my textured heavy gel and layered on a blue wash as my base. The actual painting was fairly quick, only a few hours, where I washed in more base color and then pushed in more detail and texture with some heavier paint application, dry-brushing a bit to push the peaks of the gel texture.

Now comes the really hard part, figuring out the name of this fellow and how he fits in with the artist’s narrative. I’m starting to get energized about the book again and hopefully, I can find time to devote to it over the next year while I pursue my Masters in Creative Writing. Not sure if it will be possible but we’ll have to see.