Did a LOT of messing about with all the details of the face and got something I thought looked a lot more like my partner than did the original. When I showed them to him, he liked the original better. Well, nothing to be done about that. I think this looks like him and is more refined, especially without the line work which is also something he liked. Oh, well. This is all for me anyway. Might still poke about with it, but mostly, it's done. Here's the original for comparison.

 No reason I can't get distracted. I did work on the Harvard Square piece a bit but "Portrait Artist of the Year" is on again and I get in that mood. There was a portrait I did of my partner a few years ago and I've never been truly happy with his likeness. I like the rest of it, just not him. So tonight, I decided to find the original photo and see about changing him up. This is where I got to. Still not satisfied. Will keep poking at it.

 Tiny tiny progress as it was a damned busy weekend. Looking at the last WIP of this, I could see where the colors were a looking a little faded out. If I'm going to go more towards a fauvist palette, I might as well just go. So I intensified pretty much all the colors here which I think adds a distinct glow. No idea how this is going to print out but there's only one way to find out.  Bigger, more complex pieces like this really need time to sit back and look, just not TOO much or all I do is look and never draw.

 More work on this tonight. It is very slow going as the level of detail and the number of layers is a bit daunting. That being said, there is a very important part of this image that I think is going to be the most difficult to work out, and that's the woman seated on the left third. I need to convey a sense of mystery about her, make her be more or less the focal point without letting Harvard hog the show. I'm also trying to do something that doesn't generally work in art and that's make the brightest parts recede into the background. Right now, I think she's a little dark but at least I got her in there to see. Also changed some colors a bit, brought in the trees and part of the fence and gate of the yard. This is easily as nuts as a piece I did a few years ago called "The Red Shoes," which was also along Mass Ave near the Yard.

Or even, the one I did of Marcel and Digby in Tokyo:

Those both took months. Well, I guess so is this one. This is why I don't do landscapes; they take forever.

 I have been creatively drained for weeks. Work is literally sucking the life out of me so that when I come home, I just don't want to do anything. Not really drawing anything new and while I feel badly about that, I don't have the flicker of energy to do anything about it. However, when in Boston last, I was sitting with Max in Harvard Square at his favorite place and noticed that the lighting in the afternoon was very different from the overcast photo I took years ago as reference for this image. While I love cloudy, rainy weather and the subtler colors of that, this image is supposed to be him. So I decided to see what it would look like using more of the colors from the new photo. And I think it really pops. Closer to fauvism than anything, it really pops and is a better direction. There are a couple other places I took photos of that I want to do paintings from. Landscapes are so much more troublesome than portraits for me but I also think that they might work really well with my limited approach. We'll see. Just hope I can manage to drag myself up out of this hole. The holidays are coming and I really hate them. They suck energy even worse. I can't see any relief until late January at this point and that is daunting and sad.

 I don't usually post photos here, but we have a rare occurrence of the Northern Lights here. To be fair, I can't see them much with my own eyes, but my camera can see them pretty well. My phone's camera, that is. Damned amazing things, these phones...

 It's been a long time, too long. This happens every so often. I find I just have no drive for the comic or even art at all. It can be hard to push ahead knowing that it's really just for me. Eventually, I find the energy, drive or whatever to move on. Or I find a direction. And I think I finally did for the next track. Silas is starting to feel good about his art, about the images he's making for himself without interference from the muse, the spirit of the city. While no one else has said so, he's enjoying his moment, gaining confidence. So I took some reference photos from the 'Gotta Dance' section of "Singin' in the Rain," because really, who danced better than Gene Kelly? That section, too has some great visuals even if they don't match the rest of the movie at all. Can't deny that there's been some lifelong influence from there. So between that, a little bit from the "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" part of "Yellow Submarine," I think this is going to be a much more dance-y, arty section of the comic. I want it to be more colorful, too, as if Silas is expanding his palette, his experience, opening up, whatever. So I'll try and keep the figures loose, painterly if I can. This is just a test, though the figure will likely be used in the actual comic.