Friday, July 6, 2012

THE MANY HOURS IT TAKES

I was working on the endpapers for my book last week and it killed me! Well, you know, not literally, but perhaps spiritually... in a small, small, small way. I've recovered now. But it was hard. First I painted the whole page a yellow/orange because I thought that would be the thing to do.  I thought that would be a great color to go with. Well... it wasn't. It didn't go well with the cars for some reason. So I tried all sorts of versions of a purple and blue until I found the right one. Then I had to paint around all of the cars and shapes. It would have been a LOT easier if I had that base color originally and didn't have to do that! Alas. Sometimes you have to know what's right and go with your gut. I was at my parents' house when I started working on this piece and my mom said, "Don't give yourself extra work. The orange color is fine." "Fine isn't good enough," I said. 

Then I hit another snag. I painted an airplane in the top right corner. You can kind of see it below... only I painted over it. I painted over it after painting it and repainting it dozens of times. It wasn't the right size... or shape... or this... or that... until I realized that I just didn't want an airplane there at all. So even though it came out well - I SLASHED it out. Ugh! Sometimes I drive myself crazy. I really do.


Below is a bad photo of the finished product. Many, many hours on this one!





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