Friday, June 22, 2007

Siamese progress


This is where I tried to transfer the design to the Canson paper. I poked holds along the lines then tried to get pastel to go through. The pastel I used was left over dust I keep on hand for things like this or making a background wash. It looks purplish gray, but you can see the colors involved. I then tried to work thought the holes with blue pastel pencil, but it failed miserably, too. I then made a carbon with some lead and tracing paper that worked beautifully.


Here I am establishing lights and darks. I try to put extra color as an underpainting to make the overpainting more rich.


I wanted to bring in more color than straight cream, so introduced some oranges and pinks. The color orange will also show in the background.


My palate is quite limited.


Establishing more richness of the coat, here I also worked the ears.


They come alive quickly once you put in the eyes. I didn't have the right color for #1, so that's three colors of blue layered. That is also a tiny space. It is tough working such a small space that needs to be so exact. I am fearing smears and their light coats will make mistakes tough to cover.
Do you think I got the light source consistent on both? I tried to imagine deeper right side shadows/greater left side highlights on #2 so they'd match #1.


Reference


Almost finished. Needs tweaking for more darkness and definitions on the faces, ears, and front paws. It's hard making their faces so dark without them looking concave instead of convex. Need to orange up the background a little more to match her family room and need to decide on what to do for the lower half's background. Eyes need to be crisper, make both look more crossed. Looks like I might finish it today or perhaps I'll study it a day or two.
What else do they need?

4 comments:

Well-heeled mom said...

You did a beautiful job with this!

brite69 said...

I really like it! The background color on that last one isn't exactly my cup of tea, but that's simply me. Very nice job! I can't think of anything that needs to be added.

Cricket said...

Thanks.

brite, she saw my portraint of Sad!e and wanted the same orangy-red like her downstairs rec room. It made me cringe, b/c I know there's no way I can match it. I don't want the portrait to clash. I am considering modifying it somehow as I am doing another version on the sanded papers I prefer - never done a portrait on them and it is going well regardless. This one, I'll do some orange-red, but not all.

Ron Southern said...

I don't have a dang idea, sorry! But I'm impressed. Very interesting to see the process and be carried so deep into an artist's world.