A real vacation!

I have had a lot of extra time lately since my position was terminated at my job, and I've been spending it re-organizing my house.  It's a pretty large task that I've been trying to get to for a few years and I think I'm making headway.

Today I got the rare pleasure of having the day to myself so I went about tackling my studio!  It was awesome!!  I can't help myself, I'm a bit of an organizer - always have been.  When I was little, I used to take my toys out of my toy chest and find different ways of putting them back in: largest first, in a circle, by colour, stuffed or plastic, etc.  I can't stand too much clutter, I get very anxious and it's so very distracting.  Anyway, after a about an hour and a half, my studio looks much nicer and more organized.  I felt much more comfortable attacking the ammonites after all that :)

On Friday I left the piece looking like this:

So I started by defining the shapes a bit better and getting in some of the details.  I worked in the ridges on the front ammonite and defined some of the larger "bits" of the sandy portion.  Then I worked in the texture with "squirkles".

I started adding some white to highlight the brightest portions.  I still have to smudge some of them in a bit and darken the shadows more.  Definitely more work to come, but not a bad day's work I think!