Back to blogging about how I make my artwork...
Last summer I began to talk to a new visitor to my booth at the Ithaca Farmers' Market, Lesli. Leslie is a beekeeper, and after a few visits to my booth she told me she wanted to commission a carved and painted picture on a beekeeping theme. I got excited about the idea, because I used to keep a couple of hives myself. Although my hives died off more than ten years ago, I'll never forget the feeling of working with bees. Being familiar with the subject matter, I could "feel" the picture from the start, and I knew I could make it a good one.
I work a lot from photos. So I went home, looked up pictures of bees, and printed a picture of bees on a honeycomb. I rolled the idea around on my mind. Let it sit in the background...
Leslie came to my booth again the next week. I drew her a very rough first sketch idea for the commission on a page that I printed off from the internet (you can see bees on a honeycomb at the bottom of the page). Together we tried to narrow down together what objects this beekeeping commission might include besides the central beekeeper (a frame within a frame) and hives. As a reminder, I wrote down "queen bee", "honey" and "smoker" and drew a tool of a beekeeping pry bar so I'd remember to add that as well.
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