brilliant projects heretofore unpubished: toy recall

This caterpillar toy is fairly iconic, and a few years ago I became obsessed with drawing her. I drew her precisely, in Vectorworks, and freely, like she was a caterpillar on steroids. I am hoping to get back to these pieces, and explore her further. You can make a lot of great gestures out of this pull toy.

When you are extremely limited in time, as most of us are, it becomes hard to experiment. I'd love to have the time to finish off the first painting above with just a bottle of black ink and a dropper, but if that doesn't work, I'm down one big potential piece of "finished" work. What I need is a block of time, a BIG block of time, where I can draw this critter over and over in every medium I feel like, and hope I find the one that works for me.

Before I was married, I spent a lot of time in a medium I felt I had invented myself, hyper-controlled watercolor. I sold some of that work and was always proud of it, but I never felt I was a true painter. Later I did "The Artist's Way" (read about it here), and eventually took an acrylic class with the talented Brian Rietfors at the JCCSF, where I started to wrap my head around realism. Realism is really my thing. Human figurative painting is something I hope to become skilled at some day. Painting faces though. I don't know if I'll ever get there.

So I think I might try to go the realism route with these paintings, although they are in profile and two-dimensional, so really they are more graphic than anything. At least I'll try implementing some realistic lighting and coloring, but let the profile say what it wants to say, realistic or not. I'll keep you posted.