wild hill country 2

This is the hardest part of the painting: the imagery. I have been chipping away at it all day and haven't gotten very far, stressing about other things and spending a lot of time looking vacantly at my (lack of) progress. But after today it should come together a lot faster. Doing the mockup helps a lot. I spent 14 hours on mockups alone, so a lot of the decision-making has already been done.

You can see that I sketched the basic shapes of the images in white conte first, and have already painted the trees, leaves and raindrops. Tonight I will finish the birds, deer and hoofprints before I move on. Sometimes I use stencils (and love the effect) for repeated images like leaves, but decided to paint them freehand this time so I could add the veining, which is really the underpainting showing through.

Tonight I will reward myself with the rest of season 1 of True Blood, flaked out in the den and watching it on Greg's laptop.