Whatever plague-born inspiration I had last week sadly seems to have fled, along with much of my patience for recovering it.
While I tried the same initial approach of throwing down large blots of color and working them up with values, I couldn’t get into that same zenlike state that led to the pleasing mix of texture and shadow-through-colors that happened last week. It’s more than a little disappointing and ultimately frustrating.
So instead, I did a sketch and tried to work from that, but I ended up coloring it in and messing around with light and shadow a bit:
Mainly, I was concerned with creating a cylindrical shape with a highlight along the center, like a lateral line that you might see on a very smooth fish. The sinuous curve made this a lot harder than I’d initially thought it would be, and I ended up wrestling with that for the bulk of the time that I worked on it, and while I’m not thrilled with the result, I don’t hate it, either. If I had had more time to do it, I think that I might have been able to eventually pull it off properly. As it is, however, it’s pretty obvious that I need to work on capturing the lightning of last week in the proverbial bottle.
