What happened to licensing

Ugh. Not only is my studio completely packed up and unusable while we do (very exciting!!) construction in our house, but bothof my art licensing talks fell through. One just kind of ghosted me and stopped returning my emails. That was ok, because that was the company I was less enthusiastic about working with. The real bummer was the wall art licensing company. I asked an attorney and an art coach to review their contract, compiled their suggestions and sent back my revisions. The company finally got back to me and said I seemed too scared of the process to be a good fit for them. ?! It was pretty devastating.

For a day.

I only give disappointments like that 24 hours to be the worst thing ever. After that, I have to figure out what makes them the BEST thing ever. The best thing in this case is dodging the bullet of a bad contract... 

Pet Portrait Commission

I was recently commissioned to make a collage of a black lab. Not only is it challenging to attain a likeness with torn pieces of magazine paper, but I had no idea working on such dark subject matter would be so complicated!! I started with my usual range of darkest and lightest areas, planning to fill in the gradients between. But then I realized that the dog is BLACK. There won't be any true white areas. Even highlights won't be white white. I had to redo large areas to darken them, using black and white patterns as highlights rather than mostly white pieces. Redoing those areas meant I had to redo the surrounding areas to get the gradient right. Keep in mind that I'm using salvaged magazines, so I have whatever is in my box. It's not like I can just mix up some new paint. I have to take what I've got and figure out how to make it work. I'm still figuring it out. To attain the likeness, my sketch was done against a grid of 1 in squares which was also overlaid on the photo I was given to work from. As I glue down pieces, my grid is obscured. So when I redo areas, I'm kinda eyeballing it. Anyway, I think last night was a turning point. Check out the in process photos. I'll post again when it's done.