Blink

Funny that. Just blinked and a couple of weeks went past. What happened to January 2013? It always reminds me of Einstein's quote with respect to time and relativity, "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."  Funny that it sounds more like subjective time rather than relative time.

So what happened to the rest of January. Well there was another couple of paintings and not a lot else. Saw another great picture on 500px which was an African Sunset... fabulous sky (and you know me - I like sunrises and sunsets, and all bits of sky in between). So it might turn out that this post contains some links to the steps in the creation of the oil painting. First I need to find the picture again to show what I was working on. Here it is, and thanks to Robert Weber for having taken it. Giraffes really are quite odd shaped creatures. Don't forget to try and watch the battling giraffes in Episode 1 of the BBC Series Africa (yes yes, he has already mentioned this a couple of posts ago, but you know it is the whole age thing, potentially a senior moment - ed)

So here are the steps in my painting of this; step 1, what I have just noticed is that I failed to take a photo of the quick sketch I did, to get the placement right. (another senior moment - ed?). The other thing to note is that I have inadvertently put in a slope from left to right which is not in the original (artistic licence anyone? - ed)

Then Step 2 takes me to here. Now looks like the sketch of the 'Mummy' giraffe has a diplodocus head, but the wonders of oil paint will in due course fix that!

Step 3 (we are not learning a dance for Strictly Come Dancing - ed), leads us to this place. Have to say that the photo isn't the best and the giraffe is looking more like a dinosaur (no comment - ed).

Then I appear to be almost there with step 4 this and then we finally get to the final here. Now it took me a while (seemed like hours relatively - ed) to work out that the yellow part at the bottom of the photo and hence the painting was in fact sand... initially thought it was water, but nope, was sand. You may also notice that I made the nearest, largest tree have more branches than the original, but also more than I intended, didn't get enough of the background sky in, and didn't want to try and put it in as I had lost (lost? - ed) the original sky colours.

Below are smaller images, which due to shrinking images miss out some of the painting but show the flow: