County scroll, part 17

Painting continued yesterday and the day before, and is now almost complete. First, though, here is a picture of my assistant, Misty, who occasionally gets up in my lap if she feels I'm not giving her enough attention. She enjoys watching me work, and I enjoy her being far enough from the table that she can't bat at my tools and paints.

Most of today's photos are just stages of color being added in bit by bit, including the purple I'd mentioned and was so excited about. I'm also pretty excited about how well my brush behaves. Get yourself a brush that comes to a needle sharp point, and you'll be able to manage terrific detailing like this:

Those tight places around the fingers were a bit of a challenge, but my brush was up to it.

Here we are with the purple complete, and some yellow detailing added on the birds and around the knots:

I finished out the day with white, and made a small mistake that will be covered up later, so that the figure now looks like it is winking at us:

So that was Thursday.
Friday, before I started, the sun was coming in my window at just the right angle so that the colors actually showed up on my camera in their correct hues, rather than being so dark that people keep complimenting "the black" which is actually green. So now you can finally see what I'm talking about!

I also took a pic of my palette, showing some of the colors I'm using, in an attempt to get the colors rather than the super darkened versions you see every time I try to take a picture with all that reflective gold around.

This is a palette I reuse a lot, so it's got those blue shades I won't be using on this scroll, but the orange was mixed up fresh just for the occasion. Here it is on the piece.


I'm especially pleased with how well it showed up as detailing against the green:

And finally, for Friday, I added the red and then stopped, because I wasn't feeling well:

The recipient had red hair at the time this award was originally given, and was known as the "Archer Queen", which is why the figure is holding an arrow instead of St. Matthew's book and crozier in the original image.
When I'm feeling better, I'll come back to this piece and do dark brown or black for the shoes and facial features, and then it'll be time to outline everything. Outlining is usually my least favorite step, not because it doesn't make things look good (it really makes them look terrific), but because by the time I'm ready to outline, I'm usually tired of the piece and ready to stop, and outlining often goes slowly because there's a lot of territory to cover. So it feels like a slog, even though it's necessary and important.
That's it for today! As always, thanks for the suggestions and comments.