Doings on the fourth day.

This is the fourth day of my full-time artist endeavor. I worked on the mural all day long, from about 8 in the morning to about 6:30 in the evening, with breaks for meals, coffees, emails, getting the snail mail, and other such miscellanea.

I had taken a week and a half break from painting as I was finishing up my last two weeks of work. I just had STUFF to do as I was getting ready for my break from traditional employment. Oh yeah, did I forget to mention? I'm now a full time artist, absolutely ready to either make it or break it. It was time. :)

As I was saying, Monday being my first full day, I cleaned up the studio: vacuumed, washed drop cloths, cleaned my pallet, re-arranged the furniture to better use the space. I began to make a stencil of the clouds for the reflection in the lake. It needed to be done sometime, and why not while the whole thing was dry?

It took me a little while to figure out that the papers were too heavy to combine in one full sheet and expect it to stay taped to the painting. So, each piece of copy paper was taped individually. It looked like the set of "Wheel of Fortune." Once traced, I laid it all out on the floor, redrew with marker to get a mirror image on the back, turned it over and became cutting it out. Slowly. Just the cutting lasted for hours over 2 days. (Tuesday was a little busy with other errands, and I lost a little time.)

I finished the cutting this morning, and then had to tape it again to the canvas, so that the cloud image was flipped over the water at the horizon and drawable onto the water areas. After that, commencement of painting in the clouds began. I also repainted the lowest clouds in a much better color. You wouldn't know from just looking at it how many hours this took.  '_'