Mice in the Meadow

Another detour this week – down a little path that has nothing to do with the goals I’ve set for myself for this quarter. Oh, well. The idea of abandoning goals all together is lurking about the edges of my mind, but I know (think, that is) that I can’t really go there.

mice in a meadow of flowers

Here’s Mice in the Meadow. I was very enthusiastic about the idea, but creating it was sooo difficult. In fact, for most of the process, the piece was going through that ugly stage that nearly every piece goes through. Usually, the ugly stage is brief, but with this one it went on and on—nearly to the very end.

But I was determined to keep at it and I’m glad I did.

Here’s my favorite part of the painting, mainly because of the mice:

two little mice and a lily

And it’s my favorite part even though it snubs its nose at a rule of composition, which it to never lead the eye out of the painting. The mouse on the right does just that, and I knew I was doing it - the "wrong" thing - all along. I just thought it balanced the other three mice that are all leading the eye to the center of the painting.

Here’s my process, as painful as it was. I began by drawing the outlines of the mice directly on my 9” x 12” piece of Strathmore mixed media paper. Then I painted the rest of the paper with three different greens blending into each other. I thought it would be more interesting that a solid background. I was aiming for a mid-tone, but it turned out darker than I thought it would, partly because acrylics dry darker than they are when wet.

The reason I wanted a mid-tone background is that both darks and lights look good against it. It turned out that this was mid-tone enough, though.

Anyway, I left the mice the white of the paper. My intention was to paint all the flowers then finish the mice last. I didn’t draw whole mice because I expected to lap flowers over them.

Once I had the background, I loosely sketched the larger flowers with a colored pencil, then painted them one by one. The hardest part was deciding on the color for each flower. I wanted color balance over the piece, but I also wanted to use realistic colors for each flower. I can’t tell you how ugly it looked through this whole effort! It was so spotty and just didn’t seem to make any sense. (Next painting, I'll try to remember to take photos during the process so that my descriptions will make more sense and be more interesting...)

But, onwards!

So, I began filling in with leaves and flowers of different sizes until I was satisfied. Then it ware the mice's turn.

I’m glad I left them white until the very end because it gave me a good basis on which to decide what color to paint them. As it turned out, I liked them white! I didn’t want to paint white mice (too reminiscent of lab mice), so I chose a light buff. Domestic mice come in this color but wild ones do not. I can’t explain how these tame mice got into the meadow. They just did.

I painted them loosely, then added tiny strokes of white with a Uniball pen to give them fuzzy edges and also to make them just a bit lighter.

What’s next? Maybe “Birds in the Bower”…

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