Bela Bacalhau as of April 23, 2016

This is my codfish project as of today. I am going to decorate this wooden codfish for the Marblehead Art Association. (Fifty codfish decorated by fifty area artists are going to be displayed in Marblehead and then auctioned to benefit the arts.) A Portuguese theme seems right because codfish (bacalhau) is quite popular in Portugal, hence the name (Bela Bacalhau). My plan is to decorate this wooden cutout with a Portuguese theme, taking inspiration from blue and white Portuguese tiles (azulejos) that I have seen on trips to Portugal. I have already made a mockup of the design (posted here April 9, 2016 ) Today I began laying out the design in pencil. (It seems a shame to make marks on that lovely white gesso.) I laid out the squares (tiles), measuring against my mockup. The tricky part was make sure my lines were straight and squared up. (There is no natural straight line on this fish.) It took three revisions to get the lines this straight. I kept putting Bela up on the studio wall so I could stare at here to see if the lines were straight. Every time I took a photo, I could see mistakes, so it took three revisions to get to this point. The next step is to measure and pencil in the rest of the design, maybe tomorrow? Last year I also participated in this event, and if you like, you can see what I made if you follow this link: www.flickr.com/photos/randiart/17469011928/