J37

As part of my vacation I was able to go and see my parents in Saskatchewan. Because of financial reasons I haven't been able to get back fo about 5 years. I got to hang out with my Dad and we checked the cattle twice a day. I took my digital camera to take photos of everything and one of the unique things about the cattle is that since they don't know me they are curious and on alert for the first while that I get near them and they all look at me. That meant that I was able to take alot of portrait type photos. The candids were harder to get. But I decided that I wanted to do drawings of my folks' heard. This is the start of the fist one. She is J37 and is 10 years old. The interesting thing is that I want to differntiate them based on who they really are and not based on an arbitrary number that I give them like #1, #2 etc based on the order I draw them in. Now I realise that Dad and Mom gave them arbitrary numbers but I want to use those ones and not mine. So I decide who I'm going to draw and then I call Dad and describe her to him and he tells me who she is. Alot of the older cows have lost their ear tags but Mom and Dad know who each one is.

I'm torn about what to do here though. Part of me wants to just leave this as it is because I think it works just like this. the colours are "wrong" but they work in relation to each other. This was just a first impression of what I would use as my base colours. I think I'm going to continue and "finish" it off but I would be tempted to do some of these and leave them this way.

The reason I'm convinced that they can work like this is that my mother-in-law and niece saw the roughly laid in colour of the old man on the chair I'm working on and thought it was finished. Even though the colours were obviously "wrong" because they were just really basic primaries but that showed me that I had gotten them right. And I find that interesting. So we'll see. for now this girl is going to get to have more colour added and fine tuned but for kicks I may just do each of the cows very primitively as well and see which I like better in the end.