more milkmaids! again!

Over Christmas, I did some pen and inks and one of them entitled The Milkmaid Sisters, gave me the idea to do a bigger, panoramic composition based on the idea of the 8 maids-a-milking from the song The 12 Days of Christmas.  OK, so Christmas has come and gone, and most of us have long forgotten about it but I decided to go ahead with the idea - it`s really only the title that alludes to yuletide anyway, so here`s what I came up with......

  eight maids-a-milking II

watercolour, acrylic and ink on smooth watercolour paper

(the length is A2, but I cropped them both, so no idea about the measurements of the sides of either, but promise to get the ruler out and edit this soon!)

 eight maids-a-milking I

pen and ink on smooth watercolour paper

I did both of these on a new block of watercolour paper by pencil manufacturer giant, Derwent. After playing around on one sheet with several ideas and media, I decided to go ahead, also because I didn`t have a big enough sheet of the one I normally use for my pen and inks.  It`s a much brighter white, but after completing these I wouldn`t really recommend if for pieces that need a lot of work and by that I mean it`s great for pencil and pen and light washes, but it`s not forgiving if you want to lift out colour and definitely not for scrubbing back, and you need to be careful that you aren`t too harsh rubbing out pencil marks as the paper is easily damaged. But I`m willing to do more pieces with a lighter touch to see what happens.  Anybody else used it and got any feedback to give?

Anyway, these wil be framed and ready for my opening night on the 31st. Argh, it`s getting close!

And yours truly, oblivious to the wiles of Hernán and his camera, putting on the finishing touches, aka fiddling!  I`d love to blame convalescing from the ugly, everybody`s come-down-with-it Norovirus for the totally unphotogenic shot, but that`s really a lame excuse.....So better get my beauty sleep: looks like I need it!