Updates: March 14, 2010 | June 3, 2010 | September 5, 2010

Update March 14, 2010

One thing that kind of miss from the times when kids were small is packing them into the car along with everything else and going places. About 10 year ago we did an especially long trip through Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and Wisconsin, and the fondest memory for me were incredible rock formations that we never saw before. This piece is about Utah. It is not ant particular place there, just something that makes me think of it. I am going to plant something below the towering cliff; not sure what it is going to be yet, and that slope at the right decided to be steeper than I wanted, leaving too little space for a tree… We’ll see.

Update June 3, 2010

SVOS and preparations to it kept me busy through the most of April and May, but I am now back to a somewhat normal drawing schedule. “Memories of Utah” are moving forward finally. I started to define rock formations. They will probably change somewhat as I make more progress with the cliff. Good thing this is not a depiction of any actual place and I am free to experiment and reshape rocks as I see fit

Update September 5, 2010

Finished almost all dark areas which are the most time consuming. The rest should go easier, provided I won’t catch a rock-reshaping bug again. I really need to refrain from doing that before I ruin the piece.

This one started out relatively smoothly until I realized that the background was anything but what I wanted it to be. Several attempts to solve the problem were unsuccessful, and for about a month I used every excuse to work on something else instead in hopes that the solution materializes in my head on its own. Before that happened, help came in the form of a demo by a very talented watercolorist, Terri Hill who gave a demo at FALC earlier this week. Just watching her do her magic got me out of the fog. The background is far from being finished, but at least we are moving again:

I am not sure how I ended up with the painterly background. It certainly was not a conscious decision, but I like the look:

Almost there:

Updated January 17, 2010
And I am going to call it done, nothing else to add to it: