Last week Dallas called me just as I was getting all of my things together to tell me that no one was coming to painting group. I hadn't gotten Nicole's message on my phone and was really ready to go after a very serious confrontation with my husband about the location of my child's tennis shoes, which in the end were found in the swim bag where I had put them when we went to the pool. Dallas likened our incident to and episode of 'I Love Lucy' where Desi and Lucy traded places for the day and each had to do the other ones job.

I tried to spend some of the evening painting and I seem to be whittling away at this portrait of Erica. I decided to paint over the small to medium sized canvas in the last post with this image that I have wanted to do for some time now. Ultimately, I decided that the three repetitive images upside down were just not working and I think I stated previously that no one really knew where that one was going.

From the start I felt that this portrait of Erica had a direction and some kind of objective. It felt better than the last one that was laid down before it on the same canvas. The initial 'drawing' left a remnant of a pink crocheted winter hat on the sweater of 'Erica' that I found to be interesting and felt it looked like the adornment on sweaters, shirts and the like that are so popular this season. I always love when interesting elements from old paintings come through in new ones. The trick is to keep those elements and sometimes they just don't work in the new piece.

Immediately I liked the portrait, and especially the hair which is just a quick over-layer of raw umber and black. I am liking the tones and color in the face and the shadow under the chin. I started to draw in the argyle pattern of the sweater, then hesitated. I love the white under-painting under the red grid on the sweater and was fearful to paint too much. On first sitting I painted the entire background, not leaving much remnant of a grid, which created a pinkish to purplish hue from the cadmium red light, black and white mixing together. I felt this color to be feminine and matching the adornment on the sweater.

The next step was to incorporate this image of deer in the background. I envisioned them as small from the start in the background, and thought of inverting this image of the deer/landscape exactly as it is in the second painted image. No one would believe though how many times it took to make the deer the right size I wanted, and now even while looking at them, I wonder if they should be pushed further towards Erica. However, I have worked on the deer/landscape quite a bit since this point and think that the composition looks a bit different in person rather than on the monitor. These little paintings within the painting are very time consuming as I decide how many details from this wintry landscape to include, however, it is also very enjoyable to paint these little miniature pieces. I like their little small grids. I have taken out the trees, as I feel they are an eye sore and lean too much to the left, and are a parallel distraction which leads the viewer out of the painting immediately.

Problem areas are the skirt which I hate and the right hand which I suppose I will be working on this week.