My new best friend

This innocent, even sweet, teaset is what's held up my drawing and posting for several weeks now.  The university where I work is turning 100 years old, and we are partying like it's 1999.  One of the many events is the creation of a mural mosaic depicting 100 years of our history.  A mural mosaic is a large painting that is made up of many individual paintings.  In our case, there are 180 small paintings that create the larger painting.  The mural is designed by a professional artist, and many of the flagship portraits are done by professional artists, but they wanted most of the panels done by members of the university community - including amateurs.  I have panel #112, and my reference photo was of this little tea set.  It was painted by a student in the China Painting section of the Fine Arts Faculty in 1931.  Her son has recently donated the set to our Archives.  This is my draft sketch done with watercolor pencils.  The curves of the plate gave me no end of trouble, as did the lack of tonal variation in the photo.  I'm sure I'll have to do several more  sketches before I'm comfortable with it.  My panel needs to be primarily blue to fit in with the overall picture, and needs to be done in oils or acrylics.  That's the next challenge - learning to use acrylics. Gulp!  This could be either the dumbest thing I've ever attempted or the most fun thing.  But I really am thrilled to be involved in this kind of project.

You can check out mural mosaics here   http://www.muralmosaic.com/

They really are quite amazing.