Bridal Bling

This holiday weekend is up in Rabun Gap and I've got three calligraphic jobs to work on. Sounds like I'm a workaholic but dang, this work isn't really work - it's play. The deal was that I could come up here and enjoy the festivities, while still getting what was on my plate accomplished. It's the best of both worlds. I am sitting on the back porch right now looking at a MOUNTAIN. I have all my inks, pencils, nibs and laptop / tablet and I am all set to go. This morning I was out here at 8AM listening to cows and donkeys. It is a beautiful environment for work.

We found Peter's favorite red felt hat he used to wear as a child downstairs in the basement. Put it on Anton's head and DAMN if he didn't look fine! He's wearing it today. Makes my heart melt.

Doug's sporting his vacation-weekend-no-shave-stubble look and DAMN if he doesn't look fine, too.

SO back to my work/play. I did the graphite sketch for this piece on Friday. Yesterday I inked it up in Illustrator. Things always look different when you change the medium and "trace" something. It changes and becomes something else. Somewhere along the line, I'm going to get better at retaining the graphite softness and warmth achieved by pressure and sensitivity with the pencil when I move it into Illustrator. I think there must be more play involved with gradients and blurs. I've got the Wacom tablet after all and could really start using the pen to draw with. Right now I just use the Pen tool with handlebars.

When comparing the sketch to final, you can see the compositional edits I made and how many of the strokes were shifted, left out or added. The piece looked better without the intro so I handled those words differently on the final. I'll post that piece later.


Tools! So much to play with and discover.

I am happy.