This is what you get for listening to Kenny Rogers

It's coming up on my mother's birthday soon, she would have been 72 in a couple of weeks. I'm using that as an excuse for the fact that I spent a couple of hours last weekend hunting down old Kenny Rogers, Merle Haggard and Charley Pride songs on YouTube. I guess it's no wonder that the next morning I woke up with an image in my head - an image I couldn't shake. I kept hearing the lyrics to 'The Gambler' and seeing this cowgirl studying her cards. So I decided to not let it slip by.

While the image was fresh in my mind I dug out my old cowboy hat (a souvenir from the Calgary Stampede) and found some playing cards. It was in my head that poker involved 5 cards - and sadly neither my husband or I were sure, but aesthetically 5 cards worked so that's what I went with. After a half hour of my incredibly patient hubby helping me shoot reference shots from different angles, and another hour of cutting, pasting and manipulating the images in Photoshop, I finally finished a good reference shot to work from.


Now my intent was not to copy this exactly - it's not going to be a portrait, and I don't look like a cowgirl. So I reshaped it a bit in photoshop and I reshaped it more when working on the scratchboard. She started having a hardened sort of look, which I really liked so I developed that further - at this stage it was a bit more of a grimace than I wanted...


The next steps were to soften her mouth a bit, and lay out more of the scratching (hat, hair, hand) and continued reworking of her face. I have not done much human skin before - it is a very different creature on scratchboard than fur!!


After this I relaid shadows with ink - in this way I get fading textures into the darkness instead of a sharp demarcation between light and shadow.



Lastly... numerous little touch ups and of course my favorite bit - the cards! And here is the finished picture....

"Know when to hold 'em" 9x12" Ampersand scratchboard

Some detail shots:





















I hope you've enjoyed this board, I sure enjoyed doing it! I plan to offer prints of this one, as soon as I get my business side up and running fully. Watch for posts!

Oh, and does anyone know if 5 cards in your hand makes sense for poker?? (I really need to learn to play poker some day!)

~ Pam