My initial painting idea for the capybara chasing Skull Owl is not…: ursulav

My initial painting idea for the capybara chasing Skull Owl is not really working. It's too busy, and top-heavy with detailed bits, and I was hoping I could balance it out with color, even though I should know bettr than to use color as a crutch. And that wasn't working very well--I tried about ten different styles and none of them worked for me. What I really want is watercolor--real, physical watercolor, because my processor laughs at the notion of using Painter watercolors at the size I'd need--which will involve a lot of hoop jumping if I go at it the way I'm thinking of doing, since I don't want to just transfer it to paper the usual way, which will lose all my nice megascribble linework, which, unfortunately, cannot be duplicated in physical media. (My thought is to finally get Kinko's to laser print me something on watercolor paper--I've been promising to do so for quite awhile, and the person I promised has been VERY patient--and if I can get a good print of the elaborate linework, I can try watercoloring over that and see if that gets the effect I'm after.)

I may, however, yet salvage it digitally--I started fooling around with an almost Arthur Rackham style, with the very dark sepias and muted, grungy creams, and that started to have promise. However, by that point I'd spent five or six hours hunched over it, and James looked in my face, said "Hon...your eyes are really bloodshot. I think you're done." And then I realized that my right arm ached from overuse and I stumbled into the bathroom to see that yup, my eyeballs looked as if they had road rash.

I will not give up hope, however--if the Rackham style doesn't work out, I'll try a different scene, which p'raps won't be plagued by the inherent compositional flaws.

For now, however, the next installment of Digger needs to be painted. Slugs ahoy!

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