Still figuring out what I'm doing with Neocolors.  I decided to do a second wash for a few parts, and discovered (unfortunately) that the first wash will come off when rewet.  I completely erased the left arm, as well as some of the darks in the dress!  After some struggling I've fixed the oops, and have been working on getting the values and colors in the skin tones correct.  I find it very difficult to force colors into light Colourfix paper  - I tend to work with dark tones because of this.  Since this piece is on a lighter tone, it's been a wrestling match.  The dress has been the biggest struggle.  Overall it's still on track though - still plenty of color correcting and value building to do.  I haven't done much yet with the lace of the dress, but I'll work on the details once I get the values and color balance worked out.

On Tuesday night I worked on blocking in the first Prismacolor layers.  Always a challenge to get anything done on Tuesdays when Lost is on!  It's starting to take shape.  Should get a few more hours in on Wednesday.

I've been invited to participate in this year's CPSA Silent Auction. Two years ago I also participated, and created a work using one of the alternate poses from the larger piece that was accepted that year. In that case the larger piece was Cascade, and the auction piece was Respite.  I like the idea of doing a sister piece for the silent auction - hopefully this year Opaline Dreams will be accepted, and my auction piece will be the sister piece. Yesterday I started the new piece, which is about 12" x 6" on Fresh Gray Colourfix paper.  After laying down the Neocolor II's, I used a medium sized brush dipped in water to dissolve the pigment.  It's interesting when you lay down the Neocolors in that they're not entirely intuitive; before you hit them with water, they tend to all look similar in hue and it's hard to tell what you'll end up with, especially on Colourfix paper.  Once the water starts flowing though, I love how you can move the pigment around freely, and get some wonderful watercolor-like washes.

Here's the dried work in progress.  I really like the fuzziness of it! In a few parts I left the bare paper show through, because I think it's already the right color. Next step is to start laying down the Prismacolors.  I'll post more pics as I make further progress.