In the Studio - works in progress

I was really hoping to be farther along on these before I showed them to you, but sunshine has been so ephemeral here lately, that I thought I better hurry and take the photos while I had some bit of light. Today we've gone from high winds and sunshine, to just a few minutes ago it was hailing, now it's thundering. April showers bring May flowers, right?

This is the Pelican I showed you last week.  He's coming along at a snail's pace.  I've been crocheting the medallions and drawing from them.  I plan to put three or so as wallpaper behind the pelican.  A criticism I've gotten on my drawings/paintings is that I'm kind of wishy washy as to whether I'm going for realism or a more abstracted product;  I've been told I need to pick a direction and go that way strongly.  While I don't agree with this 100%, I do find I struggle with it a bit.  I am going for something in between, but when I try to do the feathers on my birds I have trouble finding that space.

This is the same bird, a painting I did last year.   I look at it now and I can see that I have two different styles within the same painting; the feathers on the back don't belong to the feathers on the rest of the fellow.

I decided to start a couple on some art board, playing with different grounds and closer point of views.  This one I painted the ground with gesso, then did several different layers of ink, acrylic paint, more gesso, distressing each layer in between.  Then I drew on it with watercolor pencils and when that was dry I added another thin wash of gesso.  On top of the ground I began drawing the pelican, and I'm now blocking him in with gesso.

I had an idea in my head for a particular ground and I was messing around trying to recreate what I was seeing in my head.  I pooled some very runny gesso on the board and then gently lay some thin acrylic paint down in spots.  This is an example of how easily entertained I am.  I was thinking, "how can I be so easily entertained and so ADD at the same time?"  but that's just it; the smallest things catch my attention and draw me away from whatever I'm doing!  I just thought it was so cool how the purple paint fractaled off like that.  I was all, "ooooo!!!!  ahhhhhh!!!"  I ran to show DH what I made.  I really am a child at heart.

See how pretty!  It's like purple moss!

And on the purple moss goes this white faced ibis.  These are such beautiful birds.  We have flocks of them at the wetlands around the Great Salt Lake.  Their plumage is iridescent.  I usually try to steer away from sparkly paints, because I want the painting to stand on its own, not use shiny stuff to get attention, but sometimes you just have to have a little sparkle!  So I'm pretty sure I'll use some iridescent paint on this one.

What are you working on this week?