Today I transferred the new parts of "Now That I've Tasted Love..." to the canvas. It's still not a perfect system. I'm not used to stretching, priming and painting on canvas and so I still have a few options concerning the best way to do it. The tracing process is having difficulty for two reasons; firstly the surface is knobbly and so the lines can remain on the tops of the knobbles, and secondly it's plastic and so the waxy pencil doesn't like sticking there. The best solution is a smoother surface but for the time being that's not easy. My acrylic canvas is thick and very tough but I'm thinking that something smoother like polyester might have been easier to prepare.
Anyway one of my main tasks was to add detail to the reptile part. See below. In the original idea the object was a crocodile, even though it looks more like a snake in shape. It was from by unconscious so I'll have to accept things; it is a crocodile. My brain knew exactly what it meant. It would be quite wrong of me to disagree!
I realised I had to add scales, so first I divided the shape into horizontal bands, bending out from the centre. Then added vertical bands. At that point it looked like a grid. At that stage I could decide on any scale pattern, so I looked up a few crocodile images and made something halfway between a snake and a crocodile.
Painting this will be arduous. I won't start until at least March.
