Along with Coke, Norman Rockwell played a big part in cementing what we think about when we think about Santa, so I decided to pay tribute with a chalkboard rendition of one of his charming paintings.
And?
Once again I feel a little stymied by the limitations of chalk to translate beautiful oil paintings. The painting I was using for a guide is a sweet, funny image of Santa dutifully mapping out his route through South and North America, using his book of "Extra Good Boys & Girls" for a guide. It's lovely, it's detailed, it's beautiful, and I wish I could have done it justice.
Surprisingly, the trickiest part of the whole drawing was the map, because uniform, consistent, even color over a huge swath of space is not the easiest thing to do with chalk. Ditto the giant red suit (I ran out of red chalk AGAIN with this one). Because it was so huge, I couldn't leave it unblended and tried using a soft makeup sponge to even things out. It sort of worked? I also decided to use a tighter-focused image, dropping "The Saturday Evening Post" cover, which had the unfortunate side-effect of cropping out much of the map. So, it's cute, but, y'know, not as "Norman Rockwell" as I wanted.
Dave's first-view reaction: [says nothing. shakes my hand.]
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| Here's how it looked on the chalkboard |
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| My new charcoal pencil does wonders for the little facial shadows |
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| Okay, this is just straight-up adorable |
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