More Work on Sparkle

As I continued with Sparkle, I knew I needed to get the sky in before I could work on her tail.  So that's the first thing I tackled.  I began with NuPastels.  Initially, I had the bottom quite dark with layers of dark teal, purple, and gray.  The center part of the sky was a pale turquoise and the top part regular old sky blue.

I liked the idea of clouds forming at the bottom, that is, in the distance, but I didn't like how dark I had it so I lightened it with light gray.  From there I swtiched to my Rembrandts and softened and blended the blues.  Finally, I went back to the NuPastels and tentatively added some clouds at the bottom with a very light gray and white.  The bottom of the sky needs lots more work, but at this point I thought I had plenty of pigment on the top of the sky and knew I could continue with the bottom later, so I turned to Sparkle.

Beginning to put her tail in was great fun.  I thought it was important to capture some of the glimmer so about half my strokes are broken strokes.

On her face and body, I worked with pastel pencil, NuPastel, and even some Rembrandt trying to get the right colors.  I'm pretty happy with the color on the face but the correct color for the back still eludes me.  It needs some brown and orange, but also has a gray cast.  At this point, I have three layers on the back, each of them textured with two different colors.  I think I'm closing in on the base color, and here's where I'll pick up with it tomorrow.

I wish I had more space on the left of the paper because I'd like to see Sparkle more off-center to the right.  I may end up cropping the right edge.  But I'll keep working on the whole image as I've begun it.  Actually, I think a really good shape for this piece would be low and wide.  Darn - too late for that!

It's so helpful looking at a photo rather than the actualy piece because I see new things.  What I see now is that I'd like to enlarge the post to the right.  I like the look of her but haning over the back but I think I can preserve that look while adding to the right side of the post and curving the top edge so it looks more round.  So far, so good, I think.