The weather may be too nasty to fish, but it's pretty perfect for starting another painting. 

  I usually post a photo of a painting about halfway through with the major areas blocked in, and then I don't post anything else until it's almost finished. However, on this newest redfish piece, I'm going to keep taking photos every few steps to show the process (or at least MY process...I'm sure I do some things bass ackwards from the standard, or how you're "supposed to do it"). I haven't always been known to do things the most efficient way, or the most commonsensical way - always learning! 

  The idea I had here was to do a kind of vignette for the background with no real detail or defining lines - just a sparse grass patch here and there and some shadows. I want the main focus to be on the fish; originally I had planned on the fly being a little blue crab, but scratched that as I didn't want it to take away from the fish. So eventually that little paintless patch will turn into a slider. I'll add another picture every few steps - steps can be hours or days apart depending on how fast one layer dries. Oils take a while to dry, and typically lighter colors take longer than darker colors - the more white in a layer, the slower it dries. Taking that into consideration, I try to get my dark layers done first and work to lighter. Waiting for paint to dry so I can keep going is agitating for me to say the least. And as I have found, staring at it does not make the paint dry any faster. 

  I've always painted on "normally shaped" canvases, but wanted to try something different and bought this (12"x36") THING. I immediately regretted picking it up when it came down to picking a subject. Took me a little, but finally got a design nailed down that looks at home on it.  

The first image is the concept background I did on the iPad, as a vague idea of what I wanted it to look like. It's going to lighten up from there a little.