Status Report 3/21/10

It's Finished!
I worked into the wee hours of the night Friday night and got it most of the way done, and then did a little touch up here and there on Saturday morning and finished it up.
Here it is...

Here are some close up details..
The bird

The orange cat

and the dog

I'm happy with the way it turned out and am glad I tried out a new way of painting.
I now have a better understanding of why an underpainting is important.
I never understood why an artist would spend so much effort on an underpainting only to completely paint it over before. Now I do.
The extra step of a light coat of workable fixative over the underpainting was worth it also.
The fixative kept the water color from bleeding through the gouache.
You have to be careful not to put too much fixative on though. If you do the gouache will just puddle on the surface and not stick or cover well.

As a final step I sprayed a couple of coats of clear sealant over the image.
Gouache can pick up fingerprints and such very easily so I wanted to protect it.

I believe I will be revising my website so that this image will be the splash/home page.
The image that is up now was created digitally and I want to let visitors know that I am a traditional illustrator first and a digital illustrator second.
You can see my web site at ...
http://www.robertsnyderillustrates.com
to see what I mean.

I believe I'll be taking what I learned from this painting and revisiting my bird book ideas.
I have two ideas I want to work on. A Boardbook about colors and one about the alphabet.

Memories

Back in High School some friends and I were in Mrs. Bluhm's Art Appreciation/History together.
At times the class consisted of looking at one slide after another after another. That got pretty boring.
So we would draw little pictures and pass them around to amuse each other.
On one of those days the slides were of one Cathedral after another and we got bored fast.
So we started doodling.
Mrs. Bluhm was pointing out some details on one of the buildings and a particular one caught our interest and became the subject of our doodles.
I was reminiscing the other day and drew this in my sketchbook.
May I present to you.....the Flying Buttress.



Back in the High School days it was just a butt with wings.
Today it's a balloon full of hot gas.

It's painted in my sketchbook using watercolor for the blue background, and acrylic and colored pencil for the rest.