Today, I worked on a concept sketch for my next large-scale painting. I'm not sure about keeping the bird/wire in - that will have to be a game time decision!

As you may know, I painted this painting 'After Losing a Loved One' a couple months ago. My main goal was to submit it into a Canadian portrait contest. However, I stumbled across an international online art contest on Art-Competition.net and decided to submit this piece. The category was 'Emotion and Energy of Color', and probably couldn't have been more fitting to my current work. At the beginning of April I submitted this painting. At the end of April I got an email saying