The Making of Roughshod Calypso

April 17, 2002: This one is based on an existing napkin drawing, like the two most recent paintings in this series. All the paintings before these three started with a new. spontaneous drawing executed directly on the canvas. What's really different about this one is that I'm painting the outlines with thick, black lines, whereas I usually fill each shape with a solid color and define the edges of the shape with that color. In fact, I've taken to building up a bead of paint along each edge to solidify and emphasize it. Doing that has been one of the most time-consuming aspects of painting this series.

In this case, I'm redefining the rules by which these paintings operate by painting the outlines of all the shapes in black. Once the lines are all painted, this will look more like the napkin drawing on which it is based than the others. I'm not sure what I'll do next after I've finished the lines. I didn't get very far in painting the lines back in April. Instead, I was working on Stickler by the Cup and Liaison D'être , so I didn't do anything to this one between April and mid-July.

July 13, 2002: As you can see, I've made some progress on painting the lines black. It's very slow going because it's hard to maintain a consistent line width while getting nice, clean lines on a surface as rough as canvas.

July 20, 2002: I've finished painting the outlines with thick, black lines. I still don't know what I'm going to do next. We'll see.

July 29, 2002: I've decided what to do next, and started doing it. I had been thinking about going with just black lines on a white background, like the napkins, or maybe a greyscale scheme. But these work best in color when turned into paintings. This particular image is based on a later napkin, which has a somewhat more cohesive structure to it in that its parts are not as distinctly different from each other as they tend to be in the earlier napkin drawings. I think the colors on this one will end up staying within a narrower range of tonal values as a result. That, and because of the black outlines, I may paint some adjacent areas with the same color, breaking that earlier rule and preserving the cohesiveness of the design. I will probably stick with flat colors, though. Again, we'll see how that goes. So far, I've got only the background color blocked in, which is where I usually start on coloring anyway.

August 1: Progress...

August 2: Almost done. After taking this picture, I finished painting the last few shapes and then put a final coat on the background. All that remains to be done is to clean up the black outlines, but that will have to wait for all the colors to dry. That will take about a week, so you can expect to see the finished piece on this site within the next couple of weeks.

August 6: I had added a bit of copal resin to my medium (the stuff I mix my paint with) and as a result, it dried faster than expected. As noted above, I'd planned to repaint the black outlines to tidy them up after painting in all the colors. But the more I looked at it while the colors were drying, the more I felt that I should leave them alone. There's something appealing about the controlled messiness where the colors smudge some of the edges on the outlines. My natural inclination has been to clean up all the edges in this series of paintings, making them all very sharp. But this painting has been about breaking with conventions (even if they are my own idiosyncratic conventions), so I'm leaving the outlines uncharacteristically untidy. I couldn't resist touching them up just a little in a couple of places where there was a bit too much color obscuring the outlines, but I didn't do much of that.

This painting has been completed. Click here to see the finished painting, Roughshod Calypso.

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