work in progress: celtic raven

After finishing Dad's painting, I decided I wanted to do another acrylic before I get back to my apples. I spent the better part of the day yesterday deciding what I would do, and then last night worked up a sketch.
The first picture shows how I often compose paintings. I've drawn the elements of the compostion on tracing paper. Then I can move them around until I'm happy with how it looks.
Next, I lay another sheet of tracing paper over the design and trace everything again. Sometimes I'll do this tracing in ink. The next step is to turn the sheet of tracing paper over to the wrong side and trace each line in charcoal or graphite. When I flip the tracing paper over to the right side again, I have "carbonized" the image. I position the image over my canvas and tape it down, then re-trace each line again. When I peel off the tracing paper, the image has been transferred to the canvas.
Here you can see the carbonized image:

The next image is just an undercoating of paint, so I don't have to worry about rubbing the charcoal off the canvas. But, you can get an idea of what I'm doing. The image of the raven pinned to my easel is the reference image I'll be using... I swiped it from an old issue of Saltscapes magazine. As you can see, I like to work on the kitchen counter during the day, so I can see the kids and chase/fetch/feed/potty/rescue terrorized animals as needed.

Oh yeah... I'm thinking of starting a petition or something to have the school board subsidize nerve pills for parents of children who have been snowed home from school for four days now. Aaaaargh.