In Progress 1

Here's how my new still life looks so far.

Over the past many years, I've accumulated several dresses printed with lively, interesting patterns (from a fair-trade website.) I bought them because I like the fabric, but the truth is that when I wear them I look like a badly upholstered couch.  I hardly ever wear dresses in any case. So they have found a new life as part of my still life designs.

You'll see that I've developed the fabric pretty well, while sketching in the owl and neglecting other parts of the painting entirely.   This is against the classical advice to develop all parts of the painting simultaneously, beginning with an all-over sketch.  I understand that the point behind this advice is to save time and effort, so you don't realize after finishing an object of the painting to within a millimeter of its life that you should have moved it over a couple of inches, but it's just not the way I think.  I assemble a painting more like a jigsaw puzzle, and if I have to tweak a "finished" passage later, that's life.  There are some legendary painters (Chuck Close?  Stuart Shils?) who start at one corner of the painting, work across to the other corner, and then declare themselves done, but I'm not at that extreme either.