Black beasts and Golden Eagles

Sometimes a painting just flows, other times it can take an age. Even if IT takes longer than anticipated, I always seem to finish with a satisfactory result – but the black beast of Dylan proved to be a challenge. It may have been all those fluffy curls and black shadows for eyes, or simply the chaos surrounding my make-shift studio. In the end I packed away the unfinished acrylic till we had moved house, and resumed in pastel in my new “studio”/corner. I’ve adopted acrylics in the last 12 months, simply because I was too frightened to put a delicate pastel painting in the post. So, knowing Dylan was going to be winging his way south in the form of a parcel, I worked out how to post it before I started. I normally work in the middle of a large sheet of paper of a colour to suit and leave the background unpainted. This time I needed to make sure the painting fitted into an A3 portfolio, which would be easy to parcel-up and small enough to prevent flexing & bending, and I wanted to incorporate a background. I do love working in pastels – within no time my face was covered in black splodges (though that would be indigo and dark purple/brown splodges because I didn’t use any black). In fact, I got so into it that I forgot to take any work in progress photos. The cool duck-egg blue support was eradicated with lovely shades of warm madder red. Dylan was packaged up and posted, and arrived at his destination unsmudged and in one piece the very next day. I will now be doing pastel portraits by post!

ps. Henry would like me to mention that he saw two golden eagles whilst I was engrossed in my artwork!