Hey, today is day 20 with no misses. I’m on the cusp of three weeks. I think I can keep this up no problem.

I cleaned up my home studio area this morning and started work on Beef it’s what’s for dinner (food chain series) piece again. I love that steer and it’s about time I finish up the crochet component. I finished the first round of single crochet through all the outline stitching and started on the second. It’s going to be an interesting challenge increasing correctly so a steer outline goes into a lacy rectangle. I love the way it’s looking. I’ll take a picture and share when I get a few more rows done.

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I really like cows and steers – they are just really interesting creatures – so I decided to draw a frontal skeleton view. I cut one long piece of scrap museum board in half and taped it together with artist tape on the back (to be later taken apart and hung separately).

While sharpening my pencils I decided to sharpen them over the museum board. Then using a soft water color brush I brushed the shavings with a light coating of water and then water mixed with white acrylic paint. That was the wash I used for the ground of the piece.

From there it was just doing a little drawing and then a little painting over the top. I went with monocromatic because I really felt like it. Just the sudle pinks from the pencil shavings poking through was enough.

I knew from the start I wanted to play around with stitching and crochet in this piece. I figured it would just be a hodge podge of trying things out. After finishing the painted component – or at least up to the point it needed to be I started thinking about how steers are such a weird paradox of corn and beef and being in Iowa and that whole food chain issue and here I was chaining directly into a steer. I know that it’s a pun pretty much, but I kind of like that. And in many ways, crochet is the ultimate handmade because it can’t be commercially reproduced. And when the piece is done it won’t just be a little flag of crochet, it will be a full out lacey netting eveloping most of the painting and connecting the two panels together. I really like how this project has grown in content and concept very organically from that original impulse to draw pictures of a steer.

I’m hoping that by next thursday’s sketch challenge I will have it all finished up.

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