A few weeks ago I picked a family I didn’t know well and I’ll do their family portrait. This is a different scenario than my coddled past where I only selected family  members to draw. I’ve done individual portrait work but I’m unschooled and my process is rough. We all want to be better but we plant in the soil we have. I’ve got a little check list in my head for a successful portrait  but I don’t know how it applies to commission work.

Success means someone wants the picture and they’re willing to pay for it and cooperate to get it and then I produce it to everyone’s satisfaction.

This project is almost there. No money is changing hands, but the family is excited and cooperative. So I can get down to business.

First though, I made a little trip. Cross continent. On the way there I contented myself to look for inspiration in cloud patterns from the little window of a passenger jet.  On the way to the clouds we passed the familiar peaks and miles upon miles of forest that isn’t being utilized particularly well by the clueless government stewards who shouldn’t have a say one way or the other anyway, considering the land ought to be under control of the locals.

A few hundred miles further and the barren landscape (so it seems) has it’s cloud pattern to cast those blue green shadows,

This was a top down view that hinted of things to come. The clouds look solid and static, which I know them not to be and I wonder to myself what breaks them up from each other. Surely they don’t last long.

We descended beneath them. The wing bounced with the wind.

From a higher perch  the land forms and the big segmentations of land were an artful display. I always wonder how it is that no two adjacent patches are the same. One’s always darker, or a different color, or fitted with different surface variations than the others. As we fly over them I wonder why they haven’t been the object of art.

The clouds pack in almost forming a sheet. There is regular patterns in how they assemble. I have no idea how it works.

The kid in the middle seat gave me his peanuts. That made the long ride better. We descended into a green patchwork of fields and deciduous forests and I finally caught sight of the opposite side of the continent from where I live.  I’d never been this far east.