The Great Book Seminar Saga Part VI: What Now?

The Great Book Seminar Saga

Part VI: What Now?

...in which Lisa grosses everyone out before Thanksgiving...

Happy nearly Thanksgiving everyone! Best wishes for gatherings of family and friends and pumpkin pie!

Week eleven brought with it a couple of new paintings, a whole bunch of new sketches, and a wicked looking crawfish, and yet, no concrete work for week thirteen. (Wait, Lisa, didn't you skip week twelve? No, my mathematically-minded readers. Alas, alack, no Thursday Viktor class this week due to the tofurkey holiday.)

But no work? How can that be? you ask. How can you bring in four new sketches and not have any work to do for two weeks?

I shall explain, but first, the new finished work:

Final render of the porch scene. Double page spread.

Text-less double spread. The riverbank.

I have a little bit of tweaking to do on the riverbank scene. I may darken things up a bit. But for now, I'm happy with how it's working.

And now on to the sketches... I brought four new sketches to class:

The comments on the sketches were on target. The first is a bit too out-West-home-on-the-range for Bulgaria. The second, maybe too quiet. The scale in the third makes the crawfish look the same size as the boy... (Yegads! Crawfishzilla!) And the fourth? Not Viktor's cup of tea. Viktor suggested I look back in the story for my next sketches.

"How about the dugout scene?"

"You mean the one with the revolutionaries and the dead goat?"

Perfect picture book material, no?

Don't get me wrong... from my posts, you may get the impression that I don't like Viktor. Not true. I have been frustrated in this class, but the frustration is mostly self-directed. It has been a long haul figuring out new ways of working and trying to fit the project to my style and aesthetic. That being said, my work has evolved considerably since September, and Viktor has been a great help. He has an excellent eye, and his critiques are almost always fairly dead-on. However, there are moments when Viktor's aesthetic and my own don't necessarily overlap so well.

As to the sketches, I had hoped that I would have a few approved sketches to paint from during these two weeks, but instead, I had to take them back to the drawing board... Admittedly, I was a little frustrated leaving class last Thursday, so I put all of this class work aside. Sometimes it is just best to walk away... because when I finally returned to the sketches, I may have come up with a couple of new compositions that work even better than these originals!

But I shall leave you in suspense... you'll have to be patient. New sketches (and perhaps even a few finishes) next week!

I will, however, leave you with two presents.

The first... Prsenting Viktor (center), in yet another black t-shirt:


And:

Ewwww...

And thus ends Part VI and both week 11 and 12. Will Lisa draw more gigantic-creepy-crawly-roaches-of-the-river? Will she ink a sketch that (GASP!) hasn't been approved? And does Viktor own a t-shirt that isn't black? What will Part VII bring?

Find out! Next week!