Went home for lunch and worked on several images. Full disclosure: some of these have been posted before, but I am labeling them for the archives and I keep thinking, Damn, this needs just a little tweak on that dust to solidify the whole thing. You know, like this:
Daily Whipout: "Mickey Engulfed"
This is a scene from the Mickey Free story where the Mickster encounters a line of ricos in carriages fleeing across a dry lake (it seems like in every story I tell there's a dry lake which is really a stand-in for Red Lake in Mohave County), and behind the ricos come their cattle being herded by slit-eyed vaqueros with itchy trigger-fingers. Of course, the cattle churn up the dust and even though Free is riding his Jack Mule wide to avoid the vaqueros and the dust, it ultimately engulfs him, as seen here. The dust was too belabored and stagnant and I needed it to be a unit, a churning mass from the same source, thus the reworking.
Meanwhile, tried to file this one as well, but it still seemed unfinished as it was, so gave it another wash, and another name:
Daily Whipout: "The Alkalai Posse"
I also added some more color to the riders and pushed the foreground a tad more to make the white dust more vivid. Next up, a painting I pulled out my Do-Or-Die-Skies pile. Had this decent sky and nothing underneath it.
Daily Whip Out: "The Approach to Muchos Canyones"
Slapped in the riders a bit too quickly, from memory (I have good cavalry column reference but didn't take the time to go find it), then started to flesh out the foreground and realized, eventually as the wash settled, they were approaching a canyon. Every time I drive to Kingman I look off to the right in the area of the Santa Maria River and wonder about a famous In-din fight at a place called Mucho Canyones (many canyons). I've always wanted to visit it, but it is very rough country. Some day.
"He tried. He failed. And for that we love him more than ever."
—Old Vaquero tombstone epitaph
