Breakin' The Ice

DAY ONE SWEET CHOICES THREE --I blocked off the composition.

I had one more three quarter inch stretched canvas in stock, so I started one more pastry sketch--again with the chocolate mice. I only had time to christened the canvas Friday; I was in a hurry. I practiced the piano and worked out before getting to the studio to make my meager marks. All I did was break the ice, before I had to get dressed in something other than painting togs, (Why when I'm going to put them back on when I get home?), to keep my date with Honey.

Friday afternoons/evenings, Honey and I have a date. We kick off the weekend with lunch like it was our dinner at our favorite spot, do a little marketing then go home for a double feature, the second one accompanied by chicken sandwiches or BLTs or Tuna salad and crackers? Naturally, we watched our (would you believe) VHS of Joe Versus The Volcano first. This Cowboy had spent so much time ridin' my horse a week ago trying to straighten out my Adobe Flash feed that I had to see the whole film. And once again I thought it is the greatest flop movie ever. Ninety percent of the public didn't like it--no doubt because they are satisfied living with their brains in a cloud-- and only ten percent of us leap takers did.

Then while eating chicken sandwiches we a leaped back to Gilbert and Sullivan. We watched the PBS televised opera of the Guthrie Theater's production of HMS Pinafore. I had never seen the whole opera. I had only heard the music in bits and pieces. Here's most everybody's favorite:

Chocolate mice were hard to do on that first panel last year. They're not like frosted, whipped cream things where it doesn't matter how you whip your brush strokes as long as you work them like you would ice a cake or whip cream. Molded out of hard chocolate, the form is the form and --are you ready for this--there's no fudging around. So I'll do another 20 x 20 sketch to see if I can do better. My reference photo (right) is a bit dark and there's some blue violet reflections recorded so adjustments will have to be made as usual, but that's nothing new.