New: Penguin Diver

Well I finally gave in to need and bought an easel today (I've been short on supplies since a recent move across the country where most everything got left behind). Instead of waiting to be able to afford a nice one, I bought the cheapest student studio easel in the store: twelve dollars and you assemble it yourself! My two year old helped. I had to stop her from taking a hammer to it (she likes tools). And to show her how unstable it is, before she started trying to climb on it! But it is far better than my previous system of balancing my drawing board on top of a large flat packing box turned on its end, so I'm happy.

And now I've begun a new painting! It came from two sources, an old "scribble drawing" (what I call the drawings that come out of images I see in scribbles, the subconscious inspiration for much of my work) from 1991 and a new one from a drawing that my daughter did about a month ago. Here's the old scribble drawing:


My daughter's scribble:


And the new drawing from what I saw in her scribble:


I put these two together and blocked in the major shapes pretty quickly, in less than ten minutes:


This is the work so far; I haven't spent more than an hour on it. I'm debating in my head right now if I want to put larger fishes like the silver ones across the background, to form an abstract pattern; maybe fading out. We'll see.

Now I know you may say that there's no room for the girl's body, and isn't she holding onto the penguin's back, so why are his feet above her butt? and what are those strange-shaped silver fishes, and what type of penguins are they? Although I do pore over books of animal species and subspecies just to marvel in the variety of design (yeah, I know kinda weird), my work isn't meant to be realistic, so I don't worry too much about those things. These paintings are of what my mind half-remembers in its depths of things, and how it puts them together of its own accord. I might solve some of these issues along the way (also, is the water warm or cold?) or I might just leave it to be another puzzle to make you think again and take a double look.