For once, I know nothing of the potato priests. I called them that because they were short and lumpy and had small round eyes. The one on the left looks a bit nervous about something, though. Perhaps there are rumors of a mad potato peeler on the loose.

This was entirely a technical experiment. I started out with acrylic and dip-pen with acrylic ink, a little colored pencil, some liquid acrylic, and then I added the sky at the end with oil paintsticks. I don't like mucking around with oil paints, per se, but the paintsticks are a nice compromise--blendy and squishy in the appropriate fashion, but much more controllable and clean-up-able. So this was basically "Can I get a scribbly thing goin' with the pens, and then finish off the sky with the paintsticks?" and the answer appears to be "Sort of."

The end result has a definite John-Jude-Palencar-meets-James-Christiansen feel, which is good, because that's more or less what I was going for. I did learn a few interesting things along the way--the halo around each one came out much stronger than I anticipated, probably because I'm working on Ampersand Gessoboard, and when I tried to scrub off the layer of oil, I wound up taking the acrylic underpainting with it, so the glow got even stronger. The effect is stronger than I wanted, but it's hard to correct, since you can't layer acrylic back over oil. Still, at least I know how to do glow now, and that's something, even if I hardly ever paint anything glowy!

That aside, I rather like the end result. The combination of the scribbliness and the fine grain of the gessoboard against the soft squishiness of the sky is a contrast I can see pursuing in future paintings--the trick is figuring out how to get the scribbly sky to gracefully blend into the squishy sky.

Anyway! 12 x 24 on gessoboard, mixed media, original is for sale and prints are available. Send a note for details, or visit [link] for ordering info.