As behooves this time of year, I've laid out some art related goals for 2011 and I'm happy to say that I'm actually in the process of accomplishing one of those goals. A very satisfying feeling. There's something that I'd wanted to paint for quite a while, but had previously avoided doing because the subject matter was hard. Not hard in the technical sense but more in terms of the psychological aspect. I'm not usually one for surprises but this is something that I'd like to share once it's completed.
Which leaves me with the small difficulty of what image or images to share, since it's no fun to have an art blog without any visuals. To solve that problem, I'm going back in time and posting two illustrations I did when I was a student to accompany the story of Jack and the Bean Stock. This relates to what I'm writing about today because one of my goals for 2011 is to seriously entertain the possibility of doing children's book illustrations. And, yes, that's worded just ambiguously enough so as not to indenture myself too strongly. Goals are only fun if they don't turn into burdens. But of course they're also much more worthwhile if they don't transform into wishful thinking.
P.S. I've always found it helpful to work from source material so I was going to show the photograph of myself that I used as the basis for the ogre in the second illustration, but Doug suggested it was unwise. Chuckle, out of context (i.e. me pretending to be passed out at a table in order to supply photo reference for an ogre drawing) it does look pretty bad.
