DAILY PAINTING: What a difference a day makes! Yesterday, I really didn't like this painting, so I dissolved much of it with mineral spirits. My instincts were right, and I thought about how I thought I could better approach my vision. This is much better! Still lots of work to do, but I have a firmer foundation to work from.

DAILY PAINTING: I'm really tired right now, so I'm hoping it'll look better to me tomorrow, once I feel better.

DAILY PAINTING: Here's my newest--so new it hasn't even got a title yet--a knife painting on a highly textured surface. Have no idea where this one's going, so we'll just have to see what happens!

DAILY PAINTING: Nearly there! Got the gold leaf going today. Just a few details to attend to, but we'll have this done before Thanksgiving, which is just a few days away!

DAILY PAINTING: One coat of paint--at last!--on the entire canvas. No doubt, some adjustments will have to be made to value, temperature, etc. And once this is dry, the gold leaf will have to go on. But at least you can see the basic concept.

DAILY PAINTING: "Eclipse 2" is coming along. Getting to the point where you can begin to see basic value relationships. The next couple of days should see it really come alive.

DAILY PAINTING: Since I'm painting on an already colored ground, I've got to prepare those areas that are intended to be white or light by giving them a white underpainting. If I tried to paint white or yellow over the blue-purple-green that you see, I wouldn't get the result I want. So I've got to give the light colors a foundation to stand on, so to speak. You can see that I've left the whites broken so that some of the ground colors show through.

DAILY PAINTING: Here's a color study, done in pastel, for "Eclipse 2". Studies are mere approximations, and the final canvas is always going to be its own creation. The artist can "see" the work, in his or her mind's eye, in a way that no study can suggest. A study is only a way to "think" on paper, to see proportions and color relationships in a way that's more tangible than a mental image.

DAILY PAINTING: "Eclipse 2" I'm sorry this is so difficult to see. I tried to photograph it with light coming from the side to better highlight, but that seems to have had little effect. At any rate, I have transferred the drawing to this canvas, which was already prepared with a multi-colored ground. This morning, I first prepared a mask and then applied a vertical line texture (as you saw me do in E1). This texture is done in resin, which means it will take at least 3

DAILY PAINTING: Completed "Eclipse 1" You can purchase the original or prints of this painting by going to my online Saatchi art site (Gina Valenti-Lazarchik). The last photo showed a detail of the gold leaf at the focal point, but the detail did not show that gold leaf was also used near the middle of the composition to tie it all together.