Start of new signature journal and a little commission

As I already said in my previous post I am working on a second signature journal. So far it's a little different from the first one, but who knows how it will turn out in the end. Anyway, I finished the front cover this weekend. It's a little 'crowded' for my taste, but I am trying not to judge my own work too much. In trading art I have often found that others have completely different preferences to me when it comes to my own art and stuff that I was not too proud of was considered really cool and stuff I loved hardly got any attention. So one never knows what people might like. Therefore there may be two rules to live by: 1. Don't judge your own art and 2. Put everything online no matter how much you think it sucks, cause you never know who might like it! ;-)

So here's the cover for whatever it's worth:

The next pictures need some explaining: A few months ago a niece of mine asked me to make something for an empty wall in her new house. She is actually going to pay for it, so you could call it my first little real commission!

After sketching and trying out ideas I finally came up with something we both could live with (in this I was far more critical than she by the way) and now I have started to work on the actual canvasses. For her pleasure and my own I want to put up the process of making the paintings. It's a set of three long thin canvasses that are each 40 cm wide and 120 cm long. Together they form a square, but the plan is that they will be hung with a little space between them. I have never worked on such a big surface before!

I will first show the two final concepts I showed her that will form the base for the actual paintings:

She preferred the dark one because it would contrast better with her white walls.  The colors in the actual paintings will be a little different though.

Anyway, I have today started on the first layers on the 'real' paintings and here's how that looks:

It is simply a first layer of gesso and then torn pieces of sketchbookpaper glued on with acrylic medium.

And this is all three of them. Hard to believe they will one day actually look like something that can go up on a wall!

I hope to add more layers to them this week and will show the progress as I go along. Can't wait to see how they will turn out!