Painting #233 - My first day working the gallery on my class day

Today I worked the Gallery (the Open Door Gallery in Sturgis, our Co-Op), I've been doing the classes on Wednesday and then working my "work day" on Saturday, that made 3 trips per month, so, I decided to start working the afternoon before my classes, that will eliminate my Saturday work day and that means one trip less to Sturgis per month, I may also see about teaching an afternoon class while I'm working, we haven't had much traffic (guests coming in), and that would be good for me, and good for the Gallery, I'm seriously considering it.

Well, this afternoon I finished my blog painting while I was working at the Gallery so I didn't have to finish one that I started in class, when I got home, that works for the girls in class, since that means that I will still have the painting to work on next week, so I won't have mine done already, and they can finish theirs while I finish mine, that way they can see how I will do it. It's good, and I feel good about getting my little painting done before midnight.

I have been wanting to paint crows for a while, I took a workshop a few years ago, and the teacher had done some crows, so I've been thinking about it for a while. I also saw some, that another artist had done, at a gallery last January, when we were coming out of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, my friend Susan had also done a small crow painting (she used it for a business card), so I just decided to give it a try, I used a couple of reference pictures and then drew a sketch of the crows in different poses, then I just got out the paper and started painting crows, I used a blueish purple and just painted crow shapes (I used claybord this time, that's the really smooth surface), once I got the crows in, I played around with a shape that I thought was going to be a moon, well, it does kind of look like a moon, but it is very stylized, then I painted in some arc's and they are sort of like grasses or wheat, that became a design eliment that I liked, I just kept playing with that until I liked the design, then I chose the blueish purple for the background, but it kind of moved into a pinkish purple at the bottom. I got into the burnt sienna and warmed up some of the wheat or grass shapes and I liked that color with the purple and the crows. Next, I brought up the detail on the crows with some black and made some feather definitions. Once they looked like crows to me, I then wiped out the eye so it was down to the clay, I was just going to use burnt sienna, but, it really didn't do much, so I got into the orange for a bit of the eye and once that was dry, I got into the turquoise and added a bit of white for the highlight on the eye, I really liked that and I didn't want that to be the only place that the turquoise was, so I added a bit of that on the moon shape, here and there, I really like this little painting and I hope you do too.