Sometimes First Drafts Work

 Back in the day when I was requiring written essays from my students - AI being alive only in science fiction - I followed the time honored advice: Get your best thoughts down in a first draft, then go back and edit, edit, edit until you are communicating those best thoughts with your best writing.

Well, I try to follow that advice in my art as well. Find what I feel is now the best image to play with. Design the rough outline. Refine the outline - the maquette if you will - to create the boundaries of the final image.

So Five Faces started with this image of five masks I had cast in porcelain:

The next step was to turn the photograph of those 3D pieces into a 2D image that could become the final image. I did that and added a background I had painted several years ago for this piece called Tequila Sunrise:

Which brought me to this final 15x10 inch image to serve as the base for Five Faces:

But then a strange thing happened. I ran a couple of 8.5x11 copies to test some design ideas. So I started drawing on one of those smaller images and suddenly I was really having fun. So I completed the "first draft." Here:

Five Faces

I'm going to go ahead and mount this version, checking with Michael's to see if the flimsy paper will need double backing. The question now is do I return to the 15x10 version and finish what was supposed  to be the "real" image, or stick with this First Draft  and move on to something else?