I am curious,Bob, how much background work-up time-pattern cut-out prep.,reference photos, paint pattern and color mixing notes,etc.- do you put in for a non-endemic species like these teal?
Thanks for all the nice comments; glad everyone liked the teal.
Rick,
With all the sources at one's fingertips (literally, with our keyboards ;-)), there's a wealth of information out there for the taking. It's really amazing that we now have the ability to instantly look at enough reference to help determine what it is we're really seeing. Mostly a matter of deciding how much to keep and what to incorporate in order to pull something off well.
Putting together a pattern is just a matter of sketching, and oftentimes adjusting until it looks pleasing.....at least on paper. Thinking about what you want/need to paint before you start to carve helps avoid lot of problems down the road.
Nice thing about gunning decoys is that (as Joe Wooster used to say) you can "leave something to the viewer's imagination."
The technical manual that most paint manufacturer's put out (in my case Jansens / Traditions) is a huge help when trying to come up with colors "The Book" where I've kept mix notes for so many years also provides at least a starting point (if not the answer) for a color I'm trying to duplicate.
As for time spent - you must know now that for us retired farts, time is just the river we go fishing in. Once I "make" the time to sit down and carve or paint, things actually go pretty quickly, yet I don't mind spending what turns out to be a minimal bit of extra time to throw in a little finish detail that I feel really improves the overall quality of a particular decoy. In all honesty, the most important time I spend is in paying attention to the mundane "construction" tasks that I have always felt need be a part of any well-made working bird - and taking the time to see that those are done well. I'm talking about things like gluing, clamping, eliminating the use of fillers, weighting properly, strengthening heads & tails with dowels, keels, float-testing, self-righting, sanding, sealing, texturing....
It's been huge to have separate shop and painting studio areas. That somehow makes it so much easier to come to a logical "stopping point" where I can leave off on a piece and later come back fresh and pick up right where I left off. Makes working on birds so much more enjoyable.
