This drawing is about 6 years old. This is what I started with, obviously.

I won't show you the agonizing process of transferring the drawing to the canvas. Suffice it to say that there was lots of measuring, tick-mark-making, and erasing going on. This canvas is 40"x48", so I had to calculate proportions and stuff for the lengths.

I tend to use vine charcoal to draw on the canvas--sometimes pencil, but rarely, and only where I know there's going to be a dark value above it, because pencil tends to show through paint layers. Vine charcoal can be swept up in the next part of the process, the grisaille:

The grisaille is a technique I adapt from classical painting--the idea is to do a full-scale value study of the painting and to give yourself time to correct drawing errors at a still-preparatory stage, before you begin applying color. But the main thing is the value study. Painters have to pay attention to value, hue, and intensity, or, light/dark, color, and saturation. Doing a grisaille takes some of the load off, basically--you do value separately from color and chroma, which are hard enough as it is. There's no need to do all three at once if you can avoid it.

In any case, I think it's pretty clear what this painting is about. It's in the line of my other grotesques, particularly Willie.... Can you imagine what color scheme I will use? I am thinking of red, blue, and gold/yellow/tan colors. I want to emphasize the blue and golden colors--I want them to stand up to the mass of red. That's going to be difficult, but I don't have to think about that now.

Here you can see the first drawing correction I made--The amorphous agglomeration of female genitalia off to the right was unsatisfactory. There was what looked like an owl's face in there! Totally inappropriate.

Here you can see my ruthless criticism of all that exists--or at least the left side of this painting. I am so ruthless that I physically destroyed three other very large canvases while attempting this painting, so you know it's nothing for me to erase a passage or two (I use oil of spike lavender to "erase" paint that's no older than a couple of days--it cuts through paint much better than turpentine or mineral solvents). Especially at this stage of the game. There's nothing irretrievable in a grisaille--well, as long as you keep your paints lean and as flat as possible.

I find it really important to keep my lines clear to myself. I have often gotten overconfident and thought I could "see" the line with my naked eye, but it's not so easy. So, I pull out my trusty low-tack artist's tape and drag it across the main horizontal line of the composition. I won't be coloring outside the lines this time...

You can also see that I am emphasizing my planes across the hood and door of the car, the windshield, the passenger, and through the space off to the left. (I happened to occlude the driver's seat, but I will correct that later.) I feel that this transparency and planar construction is a very powerful technique--I guess this was a cubist technique first, but it has been used by futurists and later expressionists. I find it both beautiful and meaningful--I want to show the worlds colliding, intersecting, aspects intruding upon one another. It can also be a sort of trick to cohere the composition. If you don't see how, I'm not going to tell you! Trade secrets, etc. But I'm trying not to depend on that aspect of the technique here.

In the above two pictures I am continuing the task of extending my curves and transparent planes through the field to the left and above, through the buildings.

This is where I am on July 18. I have blocked in the figure directly above the passenger and put some finishing touches on the contrasts and transitions in this whole upper-middle section. Back to the grind...

As of July 20, I have repainted the driver's seat, elaborated the passenger, and set the values on the left side of the painting. It'll be a while before I touch this again--I'm going to hang it on the wall to dry before I start putting color on. I have lots of glazing to do, and I want this layer to be pretty sturdy before I start grinding paint into it, wiping it off, and using solvents and mediums and stuff like that. So, it may be another week before I post again on this one. I'm going to go do another painting in the meantime.

First splash of color. I wasn't really ready to do it, but I figured that since I just finished a painting with a whole lot of this perfect red (Flight 3), I would go ahead and use it.

And then I realized what an idiot I am. Because I fucked up again. Meaning that I did it backward--I wanted to do this painting in the right order, namely, hardest passages first, easiest later. And the red car is easy. The hard stuff is all above it! Which is another reason to do the hard stuff first! Cause if I spill anything now, I'll have to very carefully touch up the red car. Yet another reason I would want to do the car last is because it could serve as a "trap." I would be able to go outside the lines on all the stuff above it, and then very cleanly and smoothly cover all that up with red at the bottom. The line of the car against all that is above it would be decisive and crisp. Do you know what I mean? I've made it quite a bit harder for myself. Feeling like a jerk, I went ahead and began one of the harder parts of the painting: the album cover behind the passenger. I guess I'll do the dollars next, and then the people. Gee whiz.