Winter Dreams

I have two paintings taking shape (drawing phase) at the moment.

One is for the book illustration project - the last of seven. Drawing was finished this evening. I'm almost afraid to put paint to it, because the drawing works well, and once I start painting all that changes. There's been a baby in nearly all the paintings so far - and in this last painting the baby has grown up a lot. He's about eleven, I think. The fascinating thing about this project, to me, has been the way the paintings have emerged. I expected them to come one by one, and not in order, and that is precisely how it happened, but the surprise has been the characters. I've heard that writers' characters take on a life of their own, and they sometimes carry the work away from the author's original intentions, but I didn't expect that to happen with drawn characters. The pieces have all come out in unexpected ways (what's in them, and where things are), but the baby and mother have ended up looking differently than I expected, as well. They are definitely the same people from painting to painting, and they live in a particular house, which has appeared in two of the paintings (including this last one), but they weren't what I expected. For instance, the mother is a redhead, which was quite a surprise. And the baby is very blond and blue eyed, which is not at all how he looked in the earliest sketch. I feel like I found them in their own world, and I've just captured their portraits as best I could.

The other painting is one that's been growing inside me all winter. I call it Winter Dreams, and I'll post it when it's done. Now that I've had to paint people in the book project, they are showing up in the rest of my paintings, including this one. I'm happy about that.

(The snip above is an excerpt from Tummy Cat's Dreams which is being enjoyed (hopefully) somewhere, having been auctioned off for a local ASPCA fund raiser.