The Painting Gears Are Creaking Back into Motion. . .

Fleshtone wash is all done.  A black wash over gray will follow for the shoes and tricornes, and then the real fun can start.

Not much to look at just yet, but I managed to snatch a relaxing 30 minutes or so to apply a wash of fast-drying Winsor & Newton alkyd oil fleshtone last night between about 9-9:30pm.  This evening, after a day of errands and some work-related administrative 'paperwork' (actually paperless and on my laptop, but just as interesting, which is to say it absolutely is not interesting. . .  anything but in fact.), I'll return to undercoat eventual black areas in gray and then apply a black wash.  

Once that is done, a gray undercoat to the shirt areas and then a wash or two of white on top.  Then, it will simply be a random mix of browns, tans, and maybe a bit of dark blue or dark green for the remaining clothing since these figures are armed civilians.  I'll conclude with the musket stocks, barrels, firelocks, and brass buckles on the shoes.  And then it will be time to get back to those pesky flags.

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On yet another unrelated and seasonal note, let me say that I enjoy Christmas music every December.  Both traditional English and German carols as well many of the poppier tunes from the last 65-70 years.  Everything from Frank Sinatra, to Bing Crosby and the much missed David Bowie, Vince Guaraldi, Judy Garland, McCartney, Mel Torme, Nat Cole, et al.  But good God is there a lot of terrible, saccharine schlock clogging the airwaves at this time of year too.  

To wit, I submit for your review The Christmas Shoes, a fairly recent addition to the annual collective Christmas aural ouvre, a song that I do my level best to avoid hearing  -- at all -- each year.  Sadly, I was unavoidably Christmas Shoes'ed a short while ago, and I may very well need a stiff drink and a couple of aspirin to steady myself.  Others may lap it up, but to me, and while I get the intended message behind the song, it is the most contrived, soppy piece of I don't know what.  Ugh!  Apparently, a TV dramatization with Rob Lowe was produced a few years later back during the early 2000s after the song's initial appearance on the holiday airwaves. 

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I will conclude, on a more cheerful and less contrarian note, with a traditional image of Father Christmas.  Each year, I cull from the internet a bunch of Victorian, Edwardian, and Welhelmine images, which resonate with me more than the traditional Coca-Cola version of Santa Claus, which seems to have taken over virtually everywhere in the 21st century.  For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is my own gradual slippage ever farther into crotchety decrepitude and even irrelevance, I prefer the quieter, more somber images from a bygone age long before even I was born.  In my defense, my own mother has always maintained that I am, in some ways, an old soul, so there you are.

Ok.  No more Monday morning procrastination.  It's time to brave the dreaded. . .   POST OFFICE!

-- Stokes