Silk-screening Angela

The reason Angela Merkel looks so sad is either:

1 -- She realizes that Keynes was right
2 -- She realizes she doesn't care (which is a personal short-coming, no doubt)
3 -- This whole silk-screening business isn't quite panning out the way I'd anticipated and she's experiencing sympathetic harmonics.

This last one seems unlikely.

Regardless, consider this ...

This is my Krugman painting before anybody wrote on it.  What's hard to see here but quite evident in the flesh is the the gentle shading on the face of the painting.  Krugman was drawn on primed canvas with medium soft charcoal.  I then took a two and a half inch angled brush dipped in water and kind of smushed the charcoal around.  You can certainly see the effect in the shoulders, but it's a soft, gentle effect.  I'm very fond of it.

When you're done, you spray some fixative on it so it doesn't blur any further.

Merkel, on the other hand, was drawn on the computer, using a mouse.  Which is no picnic, let me tell you -- I should get one of those stylus pads

Anyway, the fun thing is that, after the drawing is complete, you dial in the palette knife tool and you can do strange and wonderful things to what started out as straight, clear lines.  Her eyebrows are an excellent example, plus all the doodling on the side of her nose.

Anyway, I'm waiting to see a sample of canvas from a local sign maker, who says he can print the Merkel image on the canvas.  My concern is that I'm picky about my canvas and I'm having reservations.

The fall back is to bring my digital projector down from upstairs, load the Merkel image, and project it on my own canvas, then sketch verbatim, if you will, then smush the stuff around with a wet brush.  Which is fine, but not perfect, as I have fixed in my head the idea that the images would be identical.  Which they won't be if I start manually smushing.