Animal Shapes

Seagulls WIP, brush strokes

2011-02-25T15:51:00.000-08:00

I did a silly mistake at the beginning by drawing the whole grid on the canvas. Usually I only draw the dots at the grid's intersections as they are enough to copy the drawings with accuracy and they disappear under the paint. The grid lines instead show through most colors and that's really annoying, but hopefully they won't be too obvious in the end.
I've actually seen paintings around where the lines are still visible, and usually you don't notice them unless paying close attention since they tend to get lost in the overall impression. I leave some of them visible on purpose in my pencil drawings but I don't like this too much in paintings.

So far I've used only the restricted earths palette, which now is up to six colors as I've found the Sepia I was looking for. The final colors will be different in some places (some bags should be almost cyan) but I'll shift the hues and adjust saturation later. For now I just try to match as closely as possible the color I want in each area using only the six available tubes.

Painting a convincing mountain of trash is not going to be easy... it seems there are a few common conventions that illustrators stick to when drawing or painting such places, I'll write a bit about them in the next post.

This is the first time I pay real attention to the brushwork too. Before I was too busy trying not to make a mess and lose control of stuff. Among others I'm studying the brushwork of Degas, Frazetta and Leyendecker, and the bags here owe something to the latter. I don't like the way he painted figures but for some objects and plants it makes very cool textures. Degas's handling of colors is probably impossible to imitate in acrylics though...

Tough seabirds

2011-02-15T15:07:00.000-08:00

Stared the painting after a ton of studies on seagulls. I wanted a slighly tough-looking girl since gulls are such badasses:

For the flocks of birds storming to the background I used a very abstract approach. First I tried to imagine two or three groups of birds and the overall shape of each group. I want their motion to kinda point to the main figure, so I thought of a few triangles. The lines going across each triangle are to suggest that they have different orientations in the 3D space:

Then I just drew the birds keeping into account these triangles and their inner lines, so that the lines of action of the birds follow them. This should give the flock a believable 3D look and keep the picture readable. I did this after several days of drawing seagulls to get a hold of their shape from various angles...

Some of these are loosely based on photos but most were drawn from imagination after a bit of warming up.

fork();

2011-02-06T08:23:00.000-08:00

I created a separate blog for my erotic/disturbing artwork:
http://animalshapes-nsfw.blogspot.com/
Plain nudes like I've shown so far will still be posted here.

Seabirds and trash

2011-01-13T14:28:00.000-08:00

...are going into the next painting. It's a seagull girl sitting into a dump hugging a friendly RL seagull. I'll decorate her with some terrible pseudo-raver teen fashion jewelry. The idea just popped up like that... amazing how "trash" and "dump" are among the first things which come to mind when thinking of seagulls, along with the beauty of the sea (on instead of it).
The drawing itself not yet ready but I have a good idea of how it should look like more or less. The colored stuff is a heap of trash bags which ironically sport beautiful colors at times. The confused dots at the top are a flock of seagulls storming the dump. The dark thing on the right is an excavator.

I haven't abandoned all the avatar and the feedlot ideas I wrote about, but I sorely needed more color practice before tackling them since they are going to be a lot more difficult than the latest paintings. This one hopefully won't take too long.

Current palette

2011-01-09T15:10:00.000-08:00

I've matched as closely as possible the main acrylics palette and main watercolors palette I'm using so it should be easier to use watercolors as quick tests for paintings. The match is not perfect for the Brown Ochre and Venetian Red but close enough. I'll probably add an equivalent of Sepia to the acrylics palette too since it's fantastic for mixing low saturation colors and warm grays.

Master studies in watercolor with the palette above (plus a small amount of a primary cyan) and the original paintings. The studies are very tiny at 2-3 inches across. I'm not trying too hard to match the exact colors or shapes for now, I'm more interested in the way values are distributed across the picture and how I can use the limited palette to approximate a color scheme. But especially the value map, since the one for the feline avatar was screwed up.

Durer's other hare

2011-01-03T15:26:00.000-08:00

The one who rented him the workshop rooms and sold him paints. Sometimes she also agreed to pose for him, as he seemed to have a peculiar fixation with leporids.

Having some fun to warm up after a chaotic month.

Besides the mannerism inspired to work of Durer's period the pose is a bit unnatural, but I had this specific pose and composition with the Celestial Globe so clear in mind that the all tests I did of alternative poses felt wrong - either the hare was too tall or didn't show the right curves. This happens a lot to me and I always wonder whether it's intuition at work or lack of observation. I admire a lot artists like Ingres who managed to harness this tendency to disregard anatomy and physics in favor of composition and yet produced very refined works.

Good bird, bad bird

2010-12-11T15:08:00.000-08:00

Can I paint a better than usual picture and fuck up badly the next one? Sure! This happens often and it's probably because I'm studying art formally after many years of undisciplined drawing. I know what I need/want to do, but bad habits, haste and small "superstitions" always try to take over, and sometimes they succeed. Well... onto the next ones.

Cross pollination

2010-12-01T15:18:00.000-08:00

I keep noticing that training certain skills improves other apparently unrelated skills. I haven't done much exercise to develop smoother line drawing, but after about two years of animal studies I'm becoming much more confident with lines too.

Geese, ducks, swans (from life)

Cougar (from photos)

I guess that's because most animals don't stand still, so you have to become very fast to draw them live and improvise a lot. This has forced me to rely on less pen strokes to draw the outline. As a result now I appreciate line drawings a lot more. I prefer to sketch animals using more lines to give them a fuzzier feeling but now I alternate the ballpoint pen with thin markers.

It feels funny to realize how much I had missed before, now even my random sketches have much more variety than they did a few years ago. Here's a few bunnies and fish drawn from the mind during a train trip.

Watercolor

2010-11-11T15:07:00.000-08:00

Studies from photos. I'm going through different ways of laying the color looking for quicker ways of doing color studies. For now I prefer very spotty and wet-looking watercolors since acrylics are already fine for smoother colors and finer details... I need to diversify a bit what I do with different media.

Human studies (with some intruders)

2010-10-19T15:14:00.000-07:00

I've started the great attack against my biggest limit... proper human portraits. These will be mostly based on studies from http://www.female-anatomy-for-artist.com/ since the site has an excellent archive of models of all body types and of different races. I don't want to learn on idealized human bodies since I already tend to idealize too much. I'll post most on my CA sketchbook only like the quick animal studies.

"I remember" done

2010-09-26T13:34:00.000-07:00

The restricted earths palette is great, I'm already in love with it. It makes saturation and temperature so much easier to experiment with! I added only some cadmium yellow here.

I selected the extinct animals from the list on a precious but utterly depressing site: http://extinctanimals.petermaas.nl/

Here is a detail of the figurines:

Starting from upper left they are:
- Baiji (aka Yangtze River Dolphin)
- Aldabra Warbler
- Po'o-uli
- Nukupu'u
- Christmas Island Pipistrelle
- Conondale Gastric-brooding Frog
- Partula snails in general (more than 50 species wiped out at once, one of the saddest episodes in the history of biology)
- Aldabra Banded Snail
- Alaotra Grebe

I tried to make them as recognizable as possible but I guess they show better in the sketches (the ones circled in red are the ones I used, except the frog which I improvised while coloring):

The one at the top (the Warbler) is actually represented belly-up, because for many of the animals listed on the site all the references I could find were photos of specimens preserved in some museum. Better than nothing though...

"I remember" WIP

2010-09-13T15:23:00.000-07:00

On the way back from holidays I thought of a vulture girl wearing several necklaces made with the skulls of extinct species (not dinosaurs but animals which got extinct in historical times). The idea was that vultures have tasted the meat of many extinct animals and so they remember even obscure ones. Didn't make much sense, but apart from that it would be impossible to find enough references of skulls of extinct animals as most of them are obscure species which hadn't been studied much. The only preserved specimen are probably lost in the archives of museums across the world. Also the choice would have been limited to vertebrates and to animals of similar size, which are silly limitations given that most endangered animals are not vertebrates and they are often small.

Take two after some research: the necklaces are not made with bones but with sculpted figurines of the animals, each one with an attached strip of cloth with the specie's name. The girl is a Griffon vulture, a species which can live more than 50 years in captivity, and all the figurines will be of species which have gone extinct in the last 50 years (a minuscule subset of them).

On to the color test, with the same limited earths palette of the unicorness:

The things in the background are construction cranes. Seems appropriate since so many recent and ongoing extinctions are due to wild urbanization. Graphically their straight lines should contrast with the curvy vulture and form a nice framing along with the staff (modeled after a Pyrenean Ibex head).

Cinder maiden

2010-09-13T15:18:00.000-07:00

No odd symbolism here, just a cinder/blackboard colored unicorness. :-)

Since I keep losing control of color saturation I'll be working for a while with a restricted palette based on earths: titanium white, ivory black, natural sienna, burnt sienna, yellow ochre and ultramarine. This painting is done using with this palette. It's a very simple palette which forces to pull the most out of each color and to think of color temperatures rather than hues, which is the key to controlling saturation.

A small treasure from the past

2010-08-29T12:23:00.000-07:00

I'm amazed at how little printed information exists about the anatomy of wild animals and how hard it is to find it. Any university bookstore has books with anatomy schemes of cows, dogs and other domesticated animals, but schemes of muscles or bones of any wild species are rare, often only found scattered in specialized reviews. Over the years I've collected on internet several gigabytes of anatomy schemes, skeleton photos, dissection photos etc., and I've bought the best books I could find on the topics. I've found stuff about some really exotic species but not as much as I'd like to. In order to find information on penguin fin muscles I had to dig them out of the Challenger Reports, the logs of an XIX century explorer ship, which also contain a few thylacine dissection drawings - very few of them, possibly the only existing study of this kind, of a species which nobody will be able to study again...

The rest of the Challenger drawings is here (links to chapters are towards the bottom of the pages).

Puffins are regularly eaten in some countries but good luck finding a scheme of their wing muscles. I could only find very crude schemes from a cute study about their swimming motion. I see it's not very useful information for most people, but it's kinda... embarassing? To discover we are so abysmally ignorant about many animals we like a lot, like penguins. We kill them by the milions and treat most of the corpses as trash, yet it seems nobody bothers to take a closer look at the little wonders.

Coloring test and an antelope

2010-08-20T15:39:00.000-07:00

I've had a really unique holiday this year... I'll post a report soon. In the meanwhile I've done a tiny coloring test for the avatar picture, hopefully no further tests will be needed.

Also found a cute recent sketch I forgot to upload anywhere:

Avatar WIP - value study

2010-07-29T15:57:00.000-07:00

Still not sure about the throne's back - from a distance the Mandelbrot version (the second) reads more clearly and the typical patterns rendered around the edges of the fractal's main body look like smoke, which can be nicely connected to the lamps.

Alex the Mastermind

2010-07-27T14:38:00.000-07:00

The initial idea was to send this as a presente to Dr. Pepperberg as a token of appreciation for her efforts to understand animals. Maybe I'll do it anyway, but I'm not sure this version of the image is appropriate for that. As much as I like anthros they are not the answer to everything and this parrot just doesn't feel like an anthro version of Alex.

I like to study anatomy thorougly and so I have always played with the anatomy of the anthros I draw and invented unusual designs like this one. I especially like functional designs which keep key features of the original animal but don't show stuff which is blatantly against physics (such as wings on a human-size creature) or would be very awkward for a real creature. That's why the owl in Harvest Moon has a birdlike body with backward knees, vestigial wings and fake beak over a human mouth. Such designs are cool for original characters like that one, but in this case, the more I look at it the more it feels weird.

When playing with anatomy with a realistic style the risk of falling into the Unbcanny Valley is always high and I think I crossed the line with this parrot. Maybe it's the beak - I left it as in the real bird because it's Alex's "face" I wanted to show after all, but maybe I should have gone all the way and used a vestigial beak like I did for the owl. Maybe it's that the legs bent in that odd way are too promintent (and very different from those of a real perched parrot) and look Exorcist-y. Maybe it's that the coloring is not very good, I did this before learning the details of color temperature and also I didn't pay enough attention to texture, and as a result the feathers look like octopus skin, and are too much detached from the rest of the picture.

I'll let this rest during vacations and give it a freshed look later. If I still have this impression I'll do a remake with either a different anthro parrot or a with a regular parrot.

Incredibly cheesy bunny

2010-07-26T16:13:00.000-07:00

What can I say, I like bunnies and everybody feels like painting something cheesy from time to time. :-)

They are actually Irish hares, and the soil slice is based on a photo of soil from a place in Ireland, and I used the palette of the Irish flag as a base. I was tempted to put a celtic symbol on the tree or on a rock but that would have pushed the cheesyness to really dangerous levels.

This was mainly a speed test, it was done from scratch in 4-5 evenings including several corrections along the way (like redrawing the smaller bunny about 4 times and the girl's muzzle several times). Also looking to put more texture in my paintings. The brush strokes here are even too small, I'll try larger ones later, though with acrylics laying down broad strokes is a real pain... acrylic paint just doesn't have the right density, viscosity and ease of mixing to allow good broad strokes. I need to try oils as soon as I get the chance.

Purring avatar's symbolism

2010-07-25T14:49:00.000-07:00

While drawing this and observing many Hindu icons I felt that this kind of pose and image composition has a sort of hypnotic effect, after a few hours I literally couldn't stop staring at it. It's not too strange since those icons are made to be displayed in homes and observed often, so they must have a very balanced look in spite of the wild saturated colors of most icons. Such icons have stood the test of time for millennia and have been invented indipendently in other cultures (like the Vitruvian Man drawn by Leonardo), so I'm tempted to think that a humanoid in this pose has some sort of subconscius relaxing effect on humans.

I did a lot of research on Hindu symbolism in order to make this picture with the right spirit and choose meaningful details. The official avatars are usually bound to an age of the world, and this is my avatar for the digital, post-industrial age which is beginning. Notes on the symbols:

- I already wrote why she is a snow leopard; they are "superstar" animals, mysterious, sexy, etc., and they strike the fantasy of most animal lovers.
- She's nude because in this age modesty is not very prized, people compulsively need to to show their goods, especially if they are young and/or feline. She has four breasts because everybody and their dog seems to have some exotic fetish.
- Maybe I'll enlarge the breasts as they are a symbol of abundance, and all in all we live in an age where a lot of people live better than their ancestors.
- The tie is a must, it's the most recognized symbol of Western society and economical power. But it can be appropriately worn by a Hindu deity because there is much mixing of symbols from different cultures, and we have to live with the results even when they look weird or uncanny.
- One hand blessing with the traditional gesture because spirituality is very much alive and people still look for comfort in such gestures.
- One hand holds a flaming wooden dagger. Natural resources make tools and grant great power, but they also run out.
- One hand holds three scrolls hidden by a veil. Traditional avatars could hold a scroll as a symbol of knowledge, but nowadays knowledge is so vast that one scroll is not enough. (She might also hold a CD in the final version.) But they are half hidden because, even though knowledge is more precious than even and a source of power, it is often despised and hidden away by veils and distractions, so that people are discouraged from pursuing it.
- The spear with three prongs is a traditional symbol which represents the three "guna", the three possible natures of worldly things: 1) things which are pure and just created (sattva), 2) things which have been altered (rajas), 3) things which are destroyed or dead (tamas). Some philosophies use the three categories to classify food, so natural food such as fresh fruit is considered more pure than cooked food, which in turn is more pure than heavily altered/manufactured food. This spear has two broken prongs and only the tamas prong left, because in our age stuff which is heavily manufactured and basically pre-digested is attempting to replace everything else.
- The axe is a traditional symbol too, it represents the wish to cut all bonds of the soul with wordly desires and material things. An old foolish ideal which is eventually crumbling to dust as we understand that mind and body cannot be separated. So her axe is crumbling too.
- The wounded paw is not a hand but a real quadruped's paw and represents the many suffering paws of the animal world. It is bandaged because we try to remedy some of the troubles, but it's not enough to heal the wound.
- Other anthropomorphic avatars like Ganesha never sport a tail, probably because it would make them "too animal". But this avatar is not a mythical animal: she is actually a fusion of human and animal at all levels, physical and spiritual, since we now understand that our future depends on biodiversity and the future of other animals. So her tail has to be prominent to remind of this. It will hold a lotus blossom, symbol of purity, because her tails is the most animal part of her and nowadays only wild animals seem to inspire with feelings of purity.
- The Karanda-makuta (head gear of lesser deities) is the only traditional symbol I have used as it is, but might be changed in some way for the final version.
- The bottom part of the throne will be shaped like a tree trunk/roots.
- Avatars are often depicted along with an animal which is their ride, for example Ganesha is shown with a harnessed mouse. I've chosen the kakapo as her ride as it's a very famous animal but also on the brink of extinction. One of many contradictions in our dealing with othe animals.
- The plate on the left contains traditional sweets of Northern India and the Himalaya region, where snow leopards may be found.
- The cup on the right contains maize cobs and Romanesco broccoli. Maize is the most powerful plant of the planet (if not the most powerful species in general) since humans in the USA and other Western countries are totally dependent on it for their food, so it deserves to be there. The other plant is there because in spite of all problems and ignorance there is a bit of diffused scientific culture, and a small effect of this on everyday life is that many people are fascinated by little things which are better appreciated by knowing the science behind them, such as the fractal broccoli.

The back of the throne was originally supposed to be shaped like a Mandelbrot set but I'll probably use a variant of Apollonian Gasket fractal instead since the set's border is too irregular and unsettling, while avatars are usually shown on thrones with regular, kinda reassuring shapes.

A hooting dancer

2010-07-06T15:55:00.000-07:00

I've been out doing some much needed drawing from life and other things. I'm getting more familiar with birds but I need to pay a lot of attention when I sketch, if I get too carried away I become careless and I begin fucking up proportions and key features of the animals. I sketches this dancing barn owl while keeping an eye on many references to avoid that. (The wing shapes are not very accurate, I just wanted to imagine them as large flat shapes as it is more useful to imagine how they could move. I tried to preserve the shape though. Owls have a quite dinstinctive wing shape when seen from above and below.)

Now they have penguins and camels in the nearby zoo. Sketching penguins with ink is great fun and interesting, I'll need to do many more next time.

The purring avatar

2010-06-16T15:00:00.000-07:00

Partial sketch for the avatar picture - this was especially inspired. I'm doing a lot of research on Hindu symbolism and other Indian lore to make this painting, building a symbolic meaning for each element of the picture just as in traditional icons; some are modified versions of traditional Hindu symbols. I'll make a detailed list later as a few important items are still missing around the base of the throne.

Meanwhile I'm painting the Alex picture, this is a crude approximation of the palette. For the actual picture I've picked a blue underpainting for the parrot and the items in the foreground to enrich the colors a bit. Using saturated/complementary underpainting is really hard to learn but I have a gut feeling that it is an ideal technique for me.

Clunky cows & colorful cats

2010-06-10T14:10:00.000-07:00

Started the sketchbook on ConceptArt. It's a bit intimidating. :-) Keep an eye there if you like these studies because I won't always post the same pictures here and in the sketchbook: I'll post here only the best ones, the ones where I have something specific to comment, or the ones from 2009 I haven't scanned yet. On CA I'll also post the ones with glaring errors to get (hopefully) more suggestions on what to improve.

Some notes on cows, in fact my first anthro cow drawings ever (I think), done to prepare for one of the next paintings:

"Epona harnessed" finished

2010-05-31T15:36:00.000-07:00

I'm not too enthusiastic about the result, this picture hits almost all my current technical limits, but it served its purpose well. I learned quite a lot on handling saturation both by mixing various grays (in the ground and puddles) and by alternating layers of complementary colors (on the body).

Before trying again complicated poses and point of view like this one I feel the need to go back for a while to practice anatomy and improve my palette choices. I'll be starting soon a sketchbook on ConceptArt.org as now I'm exercising steadily every day and I need most of all to work with more continuity. The best studies and speed paintings I'll keep posting here too (along with WIPs of full pictures of course).

"Epona Harnessed" WIP 2

2010-05-26T15:38:00.000-07:00

I wanted this picture to be a hard exercise at controlling saturation, so I'm keep it very low except for the most exposed areas of moss-skin. Most of the picture at this point is Van Dyck brown and Payne's gray, with the reddish part being burnt sienna. I'm now covering that with the layers of green and green/yellow, though it will require adjusting later to make the transition from shadow to light smoother, for example on the visible leg.

The thing on her butt is going to be a still smoking fire brand. Horses are branded all the time so it's logical whoever is keeping her tied also wants to mark her as his property.

Phtalo green I find to be the hardest hue to handle along with ultramarine. They are the hardest to mix, due to green overwhelming any other color even when added in small quantities and ultramarine causing sudden hus shifts and losing its hue and turning muddy very easily. But green is also terribly hard to glaze as it tends to turn opaque and lose a lot of strength when dried. Altough it might be due to traces of titanium white or some other pigment in my brand of choice - the great guide to paints by Bruce MacEvoy explains similar issues but it's often hard to tell whether the paint's brand has a quality issue or the pigment is just limited in that way.

Speed paintings are excellent way to test palettes and paints, so I'm doing more of them as warm-ups. Not yet doing one a day but that's what I'm aiming for now.

Alex the parrot

2010-05-21T15:39:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking for a while of making a picture of Alex the parrot, now I'm cooking what might be the right idea.

This is a slightly anthropomorphic version of him, with hands, bird-like backward knees, and a body shape similar to that of the owl from Harvest Moon. He is in the lab sitting upon a perch, in front of one of the magnetic boards he used in exercises with letters and numbers, but this time he is ready to actually write (with one of his own tail feathers). Other objects are a bird cage (top left) and a studio lamp (the top right things are the arm and the lampshade):

The plush lion is there for a reason: the picture is modeled after icons of Saint Jerome, the patron of translators and writers and translator of one of the most important editions of the Bible who was often portrayed with a lion. I think the role this parrot has had in improving the communication between humans and animals is worth being remembered among the highest and most important.

By a lucky accident the color red is also associated with Saint Jerome - and there is even a picture where the Saint appears with an African gray parrot like Alex:

"Epona Harnessed" WIP 1

2010-05-18T14:23:00.000-07:00

I removed the antlers she had in the sketches because they didn't look good for the composition (they would be too mmuch prominent given the pose and add too much weight at the bottom of the picture), and also because they didn't make much sense in this context. Epona is the deity of horses anyway... I'll paint proper deer another time.

Epona is lying on muddy ground between two puddles which will show reflected clouds and trees. This time I'm using more natural/desaturated colors and the underpainting is low saturation too, a mix of ochre, burnt Sienna, neutral gray and phtalo green. There are three main areas:

1) The challenge with the ground is giving it the wet/muddy feeling and keeping the saturation very low. I've started with a mix of Van Dyck brown and Payne's gray, and later layers will be the same plus white and possibly bits of other hues.
2) Epona is going to be mostly cool gray and green/yellow - she doesn't have fur but a coat of moss and grass, with the mane and tail made of long leaves like these of some swamp plants. I've started with a layer of red (burnt Sienna) as underpainting for the greenest areas and Payne's gray for the shadows.
3) The reflected sky will be the lightest area, the color will be similar to the mud's but overall cooler and much lighter. Plus some accents of orange on the clouds to balance the green of Epona. The main challenge here is painting a convincing surface texture for the water, but I also want to paint an interesting contrast between the mud and the sky, to make the scene look firmly on the ground and yet suspended in the sky at the same time.

Beksinski and monumental buildings

2010-05-12T13:09:00.000-07:00

What exactly makes the buildings in Beksinski's paintings feel so imposing?

The masterful perspective, the point of view from below and the composition are surely part of the reason, but there's more. He could make buildings look imposing even when seen from above and even when they are tiny in the background.

In the last picture above there is the clever detail of the window light, which is very small, suggesting the tower is very large. But in all the picture I think the illumination plays a major role. His most impressive buildings are stuck by light and better defined in the top part, while the building's base is often blurred, hidden in shadows or smoke. In the real world such an effect is most visible on mountains and huge buildings like skyscrapers when they cast shadows over each other.

To some extent we have an innate perception of natural facts like these, as part of our ability to keep orientation and recognize landmarks. As a consequence, I think that the fuzzyness in the lower part of his buildings suggests they are as imposing as mountains because they are stuck by light in a similar way. But because the shadows are also large and imposing, it also suggest the presence of other structures of similar size in the vicinity, right outside of the visible area. These paintings create the feeling that the viewer is surrounded by immense building and huge masses of clouds, even thought most of them are implied and not part of the scene.

Vertical structures surrounded by clouds, symbols of death, weird lights, desaturated colors etc. also remind of a very specific icon of the XX century... but this connection (of which I think Beksinski was well aware) is mostly symbolic and not as obvious as that with the behavior of light on mountains.

Roadmap

2010-05-08T15:35:00.000-07:00

Currently painting the Epona picture and working on other ideas, especially two:

- As a teen I spent several happy summers in Ibiza along with my parents. Ibiza is mostly known as a party place but the northern part of the island is very tranquil, with a lot of Mediterranean bush and half-wild areas, and it is traditionally a beacon of European hippy culture. There are a few hippy shops and markets which sell oddities too. Most of it is cheap mass-produced stuff, but sometimes I found items which could not be found anywhere else 20 years ago, such as religious postcards from India:

Avatar of the elephant god Ganesha

These icons are full of details which have a symbolic meaning or reference some Hindu religious stories. I'm thinking of a painting in a similar style, with a feline avatar holding slightly different/modified symbolic items representing virtues and facts of the XXI century world:

I had thought of a tiger but that would be too obvious, and also not good because tigers are a very negative symbol in hinduism, while this is supposed to be a firendly deity. She is going to be a snow leopard instead. Nowadays we are kinda obsessed with bringing rare and obscure things to the spotlight, and snowmeows are rare and obscure animals which have become famous only in the last fifty years or so. They look "edgy" for some reason, probably because of the cold/pale colors. Also they manage to keep some privacy in the wild in spite of all the people who want to film them, which nowadays is quite an achievement. :-)

- Another idea comes from a recent streak of good books and documentaries about food and the risk of a global food crisis in the near future, for example BBC's Jimmy's Global Harvest, Jimmy's Food Factory and Future of Food. These are videos everybody should watch, as in 10-20 years it will be extremely important to have a good start and understanding of the situation.

The idea started again as a fantasy scene. I was rather impressed by the description of cattle feedlots in the book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan and it led to a weird vision of a feedlot as a shady cathedral. The idea was to show a pregnant cattle smoking hard and looking very distressed in such a setting, oppressed by tall corn containers which formed a monumental, grim architecture, as in some paintings by Zdzislaw Beksinski:

The cow would be sitting in front of a large crate with such corn towers in the background:

I even figured out a logo which looks like a Christian cross for the fictional corporation which owns the place and has corn as its core business:

I was thinking of using a style similar to Beksinski's, morbid and apocalyptic. But such a scene would be cheesy and useless, it'd be just empty rethoric. So I'm keeping the elements I like - the pregnant cow, the feedlot looking like a cathedral - but I'm dropping the grim atmosphere. The cow won't look distressed but rather soothed by smoking and just a bit apathetic/resigned. The feedlot will look rather polished like the engineering achievement it is. There will be a crows of other cows too. I have a very specific atmosphere in mind for this painting, a bit surreal, not easy to describe in words... I'll just have to show it as I go on.

A small Gauguin parody and study

2010-05-01T15:46:00.000-07:00

Still studying color theory and making color tests like crazy. I did a small painting for the friends of the FurryMania forum based on Gauguin's "Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao tupapau)". The colors are based on a photo which is probably quite different from the original (most other photos are not so green and less saturated), but I liked the photo's green/sienna contrast so I used that. The hoopoe Greta is a character by Sans Souci (take a look at her cool sketch blog!).

Studying the details of Gauguin's painting was interesting. Here he curved the border of the sheets to make the foot almost tangent with it, softening the contrast between the foot and the sheet border. The foot would have broken the border too strongly without the little curve I marked here. The fold under the feet adds variety in the middle of the fruits/flowers pattern below, and adds detail to the area to balance the detailed cushions area.

On the girl's head the bed's border becomes very thin, shifting the viewer's attentio to the figure's face. I tired to keep this effect along the hoopoe's crest.

In the original the shape of the bed sheet is broken by the orange cushion. This is a detail I omitted but it was a mistake because it was very important: it connected the girl's dark shape with the dark background by breaking the bed's border and this adds a lot of depth to the bed, balancing the effects of the loose perspective and shading. In my version the sheet is too striking and the hoopoe looks almost floating in the void. I realized it before finishing but the cushion area was already cluttered because of the boar and there was little room to fix the mistake. A lesson learned.

As seen in the grayscale version the orange cushion is an intermediate value between the light and the dark shapes around it, resulting in a very harmonious values map.

The animal on the background of the original is probably an ox with an oxpecker on top of it - I couldn't find any information about it - but at first glance it looked like a boar with a long ear, and since the forum has a boar mascotte too I turned it into a boar. The curves on the far right of the original may also be the backs of other oxes grazing.

Studies from 2009 - Breaking up cetacean profiles

2010-04-11T15:11:00.000-07:00

Quadrupeds are hard to draw because their shapes are very complex while birds and cetaceans have the opposite problem: their shapes look very simple, but they are actually full of subtle curves, and without such subtleties they lose a lot.

Their profile may look a like it can be drawn with a single continuous line. Sometimes it's possible, but the result often feels stiff and lifeless to me, it's just too "designy"/oversimplified. This happens specially in dynamic poses, as real cetaceans have muscles and fat tissue shifting all the time and creating small changes in their profile depending on the movement they are doing.

So I've become used to sketch cetaceans and birds trying to break up the profile into many lines, obviously trying to keep them consistent with the actual variations in the curves of their body. Trying to keep them tangent to the curves seems a good strategy to study their bodies and get a feeling of where the subtleties lie. The results seem lively enough in spite of the hard angles.

"Harvest Moon" finished

2010-04-02T13:35:00.000-07:00

Most of my current painting ideas are about showing how much wonder I get from animals and the facts of their lives. Owls are awesome and do awesome things, like catching mice in the dark, flying without noise and using their facial masks to filter interesting sounds. I hope this picture gives an idea of how much awesome I think they are.

Painting the owls was less difficult than I expected, it just required a lot of planning. The most difficult part was actually the grain, which could have turned out better, in the end I didn't plan enough the shapes of that. A mistake I won't repeat. Grass and plants feel confusing because I haven't painted them much but the idea is always the same - start painting with abstract shapes and textures, add (sparingly) details such as individual leaves and grass blades only at the end, and only where needed by the composition.

In the end the palette is phtalo blue 15:3, dark cadmium red, Van Dyck brown, titanium white, Mars black, yellow ochre, plus traces of quinacridone magenta. I loved using phtalo + cadmium as the core of the palette. In my brand of choice (Brera aclyics) they have a similar value and similar staining power when diluted in water, which allows to mix them very accurately to choose the warm/cool level of grays.

I chose on purpose to mix up the hues rather the being strict on the color of the lights and shadows. A very good advice I found about color was that values are the most important thing and if they are consistent the picture will read well even if the hues are not what would be expected. Keeping the values consistent while mixing up hues seems to give a dreamlike feeling which I like a lot, I'll experiment more in this direction. Bot for now I keep the saturation mostly consistent too, I still need to develop more control over it.

Studies from 2009 - Quadruped quick sketches

2010-03-30T13:47:00.000-07:00

I wrote a previous note about gesture drawing for animals, but that example was about birds which are easy to sketch quickly, though it's very hard to draw them accurately or in unusual poses and the wings are a puzzle on their own. With quadrupeds even getting a basic shape right is more difficult.

At the beginning my biggest problem with quadrupeds was that I saw too many things going on - too many limbs in motion, too many lines to follow, too many masses:

When doing gesture drawing of humans the most important line is usually the backbone, and all other lines follow logically from it. Sometimes it is obvious in quadrupeds too:

But I look on purpose for weird poses where it is hard to figure out which lines are the most important for the overall shapes. Giraffes have unusually long legs, the neck is a unique feature which changes a lot the visual balance of their body, and on top of that their movements are very constrained. So trying to make giraffes look agile and not stiff is an interesting exercise.

(Warning: click for slightly NSFW giraffe)

The little figures on the right are a possible way to sketch quadruped poses considering only a few main lines and masses. I did a lot of them too and it turns out they are also a good exercise in synthesis, to train oneself to remember well the proportions and two or three key features of a species. The can be useful to study features at any level, for example to study small differences between species which look very similar, as in this example with antelope horns:

"Harvest Moon" WIP 6

2010-03-25T15:46:00.000-07:00

It's not missing much! I need to finalize the sky, paint wheat at the bottom and then do small retouches.The big owl was not supposed to look exactly like a real barn owl but I'll probably add tiny brown dots and a viel of ochre in some areas, as she looks too plain.

I wonder if the inner feathers of the wing on the left are too dark, they probably need to blend better with the arm and the outer feathers.

"Harvest Moon" WIP 5

2010-03-11T15:37:00.000-08:00

I'll keep the number of color tubes used low for a few more pictures - with this one I'm learning a lot on how to control saturation and hues but I'm still not very comfortable with mixing desaturated colors from more than two colors (plus white). Most of the gray areas area a mix of phtalo blue 15:3 and cadmium red with a small addition of yellow ochre. Working with two main colors to get the grays and a third one for fine tuning seems to work well.

I'm keeping the owls on the trees slightly out of focus to suggest distance too.

On a side note, how cool is this incoming movie?? It's about time for owls to get more love from the media. :-) Don't forget to give a caress to your garden's owl today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsAErYNyRuE

"Shadows" finished

2010-03-05T16:05:00.000-08:00

I'm aware that dazzle painting is probably not very useful for hunting rabbits, but I still find it cooler than symmetrical tribal paintings and such! It might actually provide some camouflage in a thick undergrowth. In future maybe I'll paint that on a cetacean.

Some kinds of dazzle painting actually made use of strong colors, even red like the vixen's fur:

"Shadows" WIP 2

2010-03-03T15:46:00.001-08:00

Gave priority to this smaller picture while I meditate about the hues needed by the owls and the horse goddess.

I started with a thin underpainting of ultramarine and burnt sienna, but the hues didn't look quite right on the background, so I started covering it with a rather thick layer of paint and I think it will hide it completely. In the end the palette is just phtalo blue 15:3, burnt sienna, titanium white and little bits of cadmium yellow light. The range of hues and values which can be done with just phtalo + sienna is amazing, it looks like many more colors are being used rather than just two.

I need to give more sense of volume and depth in my pictures, so I experimented with a few technique which improve the illusion of depth. In this case I'm painting the background forest slightly blurred while the fox will be mostly well focused. It's a very basic technique for adding depth, and needs to be done with care because it's very very easy to overdo it and make the background look messy and fake. In this case though I think it should work fine along with the scattered light through the leaves coming from the background plane itself. The blur should add to the light effect to create the impression of a slightly hazy atmosphere.

Progression

2010-02-21T03:01:00.000-08:00

An idea I put together in a couple days, originating from a half-lucid dream. There were anthro foxes who painted their fur with lots of black forming a sort of disruptive camouflage pattern, something similar to dazzle painting for ships. So I looked for a nice scene illustrating the concept. This is the sequence of thumbnails and sketches, from the first attemtps to find a nice pose to the copy I'm going to color.

Picture 3 is the same size of 4-5 and was supposed to be the proper sketch, instead it's what happens when I try to draw hastily and without really reasoning about the pose... a mess. Picture 4-5 are basically the same done with more patience and thinking carefully about every line and volume. The difference is worth the effort, but it's really hard to stay focused at times...

"Harvest Moon" WIP 4 + sketches

2010-02-11T15:39:00.000-08:00

I'm still scared to screw up the picture with every stroke, but things are actually beginning to feel easier. Now I know that if I screw up volumes is only because I'm not visualizing them correctly, and not because I lack the understanding of some tool. It was really frustrating to try drawing lights and shadows without knowing values theory and paying attention to things like value contrast.

I designed this picture so that the darker sides of the owls are seen on the background of bright areas while the highlighted sides have the dark sky as background. The sky also gets lighter towards the bottom, so the dark part of the girl is contrasted against a lighter red behind it. At the bottom of the picture there will be ripe grain painted in a relatively light ochre.

This photo is a bit too red, the shading on the girl is actually dark blue in places (phtalo with a little bit of red) and looks definitely darker. I really need to figure out a better camera setup.

Working on several ideas for the next painting in the meanwhile. One of them involves a tied and badly beaten Epona (the horse deity, not the Zelda one!) giving the finger to her human aggressor, showing that her spirit is not yet tamed...

The first version was, uh, kinda like a dinosaur. Added the antlers too because they seemed appropriate, but they'll probably be gone as they don't really make sense. Epona is the deity of horses, not of all ungulates.
After some tinkering... that's better. Without the antlers and with a better drawn leg she might be ready for painting.
Not it has three distinct sheets attached one on top of the other, it's not exactly the way sketches are supposed to work. :-) I guess barbaric corrections like this one look quite weird to people who have a proper art training.

Portrait of Bluefire

2010-01-30T02:22:00.000-08:00

A portrait of chakasa Bluefire done as a present for my good friend leonardo. Bluefire works as an Environmental Restorer, a rather difficult job which is basically fixing/cleaning up the mess left by the late industrial age, back when earthlings deluded themselves that the planet's resources could be exploited without limits.

Most of hir job revolves around slowly restroing soil fertility and biodiversity into barren areas, so that in a few centuries they can produce something again. Here however shi is just taking a pause into a recently burned down wood, where new saplings are beginning to grow back.

Acrylics on board. Unluckily no WIPs for this as I was very unsure while painting it and thought I'd have to restart any time, so I didn't make photos of the various stages... I really need to get past this stupid worrying. Also because now I'm able to correct most mistakes along the way.

For the palette I used many colors but the main components for the background are violet and phtalo green, the rest is various shades of gray done with combinations of blacks (Mars and ivory, the latter has the lowest value), titanium white, ultramarine, Van Dyck brown and yellow ochre.

More 30 minute sketches

2010-01-27T15:17:00.000-08:00

The next posts will be more about anthros, WIPs and annotated sketches, but in the meanwhile I think sharing these exercises is useful too. They are not very funny to do, so it's better to do them inbetween other stuff rather than diving head first into them, but they teach a lot of things which I wouldn't feel comfortable trying in a proper picture. All of these are acrylics on paper with classical limited palettes of 3-4 colors (for most of them Yellow ochre, burnt sienna/Van Dyck brown, titanium white, ivory black).

For the animals I started from photos which look very static and I tried to add some feeling of movement using the direction of strokes:

For landscapes I'm doing mostly value studies, trying ways to render things like tangled branches and mist:
(This is an ice cliff painted with an odd palette of white, black, ultramarine, and cadmium red for the shadows.)

Also some loose drawings, mostly exercises to keep the species recognizable in spite of stylization or parts of the body being hidden:

"Harvest Moon" WIP 3

2010-01-20T15:11:00.001-08:00

Currently the way I do the first stages of paintings has been influenced a lot by the excellent Foundation Painting DVD by Shawn Barber. Basically he describes starting with a rough pencil sketch on the canvas and thinking of painting as refining the drawing, just like one would do with pencil. I like sketching and drawing much more than painting loosely, so this approach immediately felt natural to me.

The first step was the phtalo blue underpainting, pencil sketch and some light washes of white to figure out the brighter areas. Then I started with the sky since its color and lightness are very dominating and thus it's better to have it in place before starting with the owls, which will have a lot of white and would easily come out too bright without the background as a reference. (Owls on the trees need to be less bright than the main girl, because they are further away and making them full white would distract the eye from the main girl too soon, which would make the scene look too crowded and confusing.)

With the sky in place it is safe to start with the owls. I started from shadows because in general it's easier to paint with bright colors over dark colors (it's much easier to keep the color under control and get subtle shades of gray). But this time I will really leave the lightest and darkest colors last. Having them in the painting since the beginning is very distracting - I end up with a distorted perception of the intermediate colors and I end up painting more abrupt changes of value instead of subtle variations, like it happened in the crucified owl painting...

30 minutes studies

2010-01-13T15:18:00.000-08:00

In 2009 I've been doing exercises jumping round-robin from one kind of exercise to the other, but now I think I need to focus on certain exercises for a few weeks in a row in order to learn the difficult stuff. Now for daily exercises I'll focus for 1-2 months on quick paintings, with two main goals:

- Learning more about lightness and about color temperature of low saturation colors (i.e. how to use effectively warm and cool grays in the same picture, to suggest light of a certain hue etc.);
- Applying to actual pictures the things I learned about landscapes with the ink exercises.

I'll work mostly with limited palettes and low saturation colors so I can concentrate just on lightness and temperature. A good palette for this kind of studies (as suggested on ConcpetArt.org) is:

- yellow ochre
- titanium white
- burnt sienna
- a very dark black

Most blacks mixed with titanium white result in cool grays, so this palette allows to experiment with both warm and cool grays. It is optimized for human skin tones but ochre and sienna are very flexible colors and it's fine for studying values. In some cases (like the camel picture below) I replace burnt sienna with Van Dyck brown to keep the saturation lower.

I'll try different styles but I also want to focus on wide brush strokes, on the track of Sargent and digital speed painting, because they look awesome and they seem a good way to render complex movements as those of birds in flight.

Studies from 2009 - Landscapes, with more detail

2010-01-10T12:54:00.000-08:00

These were done a few months after the first attempts at this exercise. After getting used to think of values first, details no longer feel so distracting! I'm trying to ignore most visual noise and go for the most visible shapes. At this point it should be safe to put in some details: once you learn to get the big picture you also learn which details are useful and which ones are not, so there can be a few more branches as long as they they don't harm clarity. (Again india ink, from random Flickr photos.)

"Harvest Moon" WIP 2

2010-01-07T15:51:00.000-08:00

For the crucified owl I did just some very basic tests to decide the colors, but since I'm not quite comfortable with colors yet, for this painting I did again many tests as for the oryx painting. For now I want to experiment with direct complementaries and I like using fairly crazy hues... so I came up with a cadmium red - phtalo blue palette similar to this one (painting by Zdizslaw Beksinski):

I'm also a bit obsessed with learning complementary underpainting, which is hard to do properly but allows for very nice effects. After a few tests it turns out that a phtalo blue underpainting with red/brown on top of it may actually work and create some interesting contrasts and blur effects where it is not completely covered:

The sky is probably going to have some more blue, to give more volume to the clouds. On the left a test for feathers (the yellow is ochre). Probably they won't look exactly like that but the contour effect is very interesting and is what I'll try to get in some places. The light/shadow colors albeit unnatural look oddly consistent. For them I followed the simple rule of thumb of giving shadows the opposite hue and temperature of the light: since the moon is going to be very bright blue, the shadow areas should be in the red/brown range. I've used for them a warm grey obtained just from the two main colors, phtalo blue and cadmium red.

Because they are near perfect complementaries on the color wheel they can mix to a very dark grey, and adding more of either color shifts the grey to either cool or warm in a nice gradual way. With such good grays available I'll probably need very little black for the painting.

I also tested carefully how the values should be distributed in the image, to make sure only the main figure gets the brightest highlights and everything is well contrasted:
And here we go!

Studies from 2009 - Landscapes and interiors

2010-01-03T09:16:00.001-08:00

Speed painting (mostly from random photos off flickr) done with India ink and a large brush:
The goal in these is forcing myself to ignore details and look just at the apparent values of the landscape - light and dark areas. The principle is the same of the gesture drawings of animals.

If I sketch landscapes with a pen I tend to draw a huge flat mess like this:

I sketched this in a hort full of plants and visual noise (many small leaves and branches etc.). In such situations I get distracted by details and I don't even think about values, but values are the most important thing to achieve a good composition, so they are also the most important when drawing a landscape from the mind. This was the first painting where I designed the landscape thinking just of values and light/dark areas:

Owl feathers and facial masks

2009-12-27T15:12:00.001-08:00

Studies for the crucified owl painting and the current one.

Some thoughts on sketching feather coats. Even finding good ways of making thumbnails is hard with all the variety of coats, limbs, etc., but I think that certain feelings which are typical of an animal's appearence should be given even in the crudest doodle. Birds often give the impression that they are covered by few broad sheets rather than many individual feathers, so I prefer to sketch them like that.

The facial mask is the most typical feature of a barn owl. From the front is looks almost flat, but from the side it reveals a quite complex 3D shape.

(from Wikipedia)

I don't like drawing anthros with a true beak, so when drawing anthro birds I usually give them a mammal's mouth with the upper part of the beak on top of it. This gives them a very flexible mouth while keeping the appearance of a bird or a gryphon.

But for barn owls the proportions and the shape of the mask are important, they are a big part of the appeal to me. Barn owls also have a few feathers on both sides of the beak which hide away most of the mouth, so that the mask surface is smoother and it can do a better job of focusing sounds. For me small functional details like that one are part of the appeal of animals.

The head shape I've settled on is more or less this:

Getting ready...

2009-12-23T15:05:00.001-08:00

I'm taking a short break to fulfill Christmas duties, as you can see... all reindeer have a lot of work to do tomorrow!
Merry Christmas!

Studies from last year - Gesture drawing for animals

2009-12-16T15:51:00.000-08:00

Gesture drawing is a classical drawing exercise which is somewhat related to the line of action concept. The idea is to sketch human figures very quickly (like 30-45 seconds), without detail but trying to capture the essence of the pose/movement. Posemaniacs.com has a very good Flash tool for that.

I wanted to do the same with animals, so I used a slideshow program to show random photos from my collection for 30-40 seconds each, and the first attempts sucked quite a lot - how can you draw an animal you have never studied before in just 30 seconds and have it not suck?

Boobies with Issues & deformed cats!

But later I go the point.

30 seconds are not enough to draw a body, you can only draw a few lines and shapes in that time. That's what gesture drawing is about - training the eye to break down poses and movement so it can quickly pick up the most important shapes and ignore the rest. It's learning to analyze a body without getting distracted by details like fur texture or colors.

Starting to figure it out?

Learning to see the individual shapes is as important as seeing the harmony of the whole body and it's even more important when you have to rely mostly on photos and videos, which is the only practical way to draw exotic animals on a regular basis. Photos are cluttered by useless details and this kind of exercise forces you to ignore it and look only at the essential stuff. Which makes it easier to learn and remember the looks of many different species.

Gesture drawing is well known in art academies but again I found almost nothing about doing this with animals. In future posts I'll review the artists I found who have studied the topic, however none of them has gone into much detail, even Glen Vilppu, who has done the most thorough studies of animal gestures so far. And nobody worked on truly exotic animals either - most artistic studies of animals are limited to horses and a handful of other common animals.

"Harvest Moon" WIP 1

2009-12-12T16:43:00.000-08:00

With witches being associated to owls I liked the idea of an anthro barn owl witch. I wanted to make a painting of such a witch with a large moon behind her, but couldn't come up with a good concept. I made many attempts to sketch a night scene with a very large and bright moon. Point of view from the bottom, as if the viewer were a scared paesant and the owl (with cape) was casting a spell on him with a meancing claw gesture.

Boring. The owl should be naked and display lush feathers, for a start. Naked owl girls are better.

But it's just a random character striking an odd pose and "casting a spell"... meh.

I found the right idea (right for me anyway!) thinking less about magic and more about the role of owls in farm life. Owls have been hunting pests like rats in our fields for millennia, along with cats and many small predators like snakes and foxes. Before pesticides were introduced their hunting skills saved countless humans from famines and diseases brought on by rodents. In spite of this many humans were quite ungrateful and considered owls to be evil spirits and signs of ill omen...

So I'll paint an owl which looks a bit like a witch, because I still like the idea, but she is not casting any spells. She is just reminding proudly to the viewer that owls have done a lot to kill mice and protect our crops. She is sorrounded by a flock of barn owls standing on tree branches, each holding a dead mouse in the beak.

I no longer do precise sketches before a painting because it's very hard to copy a precise sketch to the canvas, but this is a body shape I'm not familiar with and I wanted her to have a rounded look which reminded a caped figure, so I did an accurate sketch of her, and also plans for the owls on the background:

Figurines

2009-12-09T15:06:00.000-08:00

Back from a day of fundraising for the WWF. My local group is selling animal figurines crafted in Ecuador from dried nuts of the Tagua tree. Some of them are quite interesting because you can tell exatly which species they are, in spite of being exotic animals stylized in an unusual way.

This is a very recognizable frigate bird. The dots on the front even remind the sparse feathers seen at the borders of the bird's air sac when it is inflated:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Male_Frigate_bird.jpg

This is especially interesting. The black spots are enough to make me think of an orca immediately, even though the orca pattern is very different from this one. Without the spots it would look like a weird generic whale, but the most well known cetacean with a visible black pattern is the orca, so even a small spot immediately reminds of it. The rounded forehead and the shape of the muzzle also are very similar to an orca's, even thought the proportions of the rest of the body are warped.

A porcupine. I don't know them well enough to tell if it's one species in particular but it's carefully carved to show that the spikes only cover the front part of the body.

The design of this one is just amazing. I wonder how many western artists could come up with such a beautiful stylization of an insect. There were two kind of grasshopper figurines, very similar but with different heads, so again I wouldn't be surprised if they were based on two particular species from Ecuador. They show well that the author is familiar with all sort of critters and is used to observe them closely.

Studies from last year - More line of action ideas

2009-12-06T12:35:00.001-08:00

That's a tern photographed with a high speed camera. She was caught during an extremely complex movement which involves most parts of her body, and that's the kind of motion which makes a tern look like a master of flight and not a chicken. They are probably the most skilled fliers in the world along with hawks and owls.

How do you even begin to study poses like this one?

These were my early attemps to extract LOAs from photos of birds (last part of the batch of sketches with crappy text, I swear!):

When birds are perched the tail is often an important line.

I tried to reduce each pose to a minimum number of lines (in red, the red number is the lines count). But the resulting stick figure has nothing to do with the original, if you look at the red lines alone you could never tell they represent a bird during a wing beat...

Often the most visible lines of birds in flight are the edges of wings and in fact birds are often simplified like this:

That's easy to recognize but also very anonymous. The supreme elegance of the tern's wingbeat is gone.

These are new from yesterday, tried again with the tern photo:

BIRDS EVERYWHERE

The right one is the best I got so far, I'd start from a scheme like this to design a tern in flight. It's very different from a classic LOAs scheme, but it's just three lines and it keeps the lines and proportions I see as most evident in the photo. The left one looks odd because the wing line on the right is too parallel to the body line; both the left one and the center one show the body too large so it doesn't look like a tiny bird at all.

"Crucifige" finished

2009-12-01T14:21:00.001-08:00

I added on the owl's body mor thin glazes of gray, gray + ultramarine and gray + natural sienna, with different value depending on the spot. I worked especially around the facial mask which looked weird. I also added more layers to the background (gray, sienna, magenta) but it looked a bit dull and confusing, so I later decided to cover it completely with desaturated magenta, and also darken the areas of black + ultrmarine on the top and bottom right.

And this is the final version, after adding more glazing (especially sienna on the body and wings) and puttin gin more pure white for highlights and black/dark grey + ultramarine for deep shadows:

Color corrected to look more like the real one, although its look depends a lot on the lights of the room.

PS: just found a photo of the real thing...
http://www.therootdoctor.se/swedishmagic4.jpg

Studies from last year - Line of action for animals

2009-11-29T03:29:00.000-08:00

I first learned about the "Line of Action" (shortened "LOA" in my notes) reading John K.'s excellent animation blog ( http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/ ). The concept is summed up in this picture by Preston Blair:

Arguably the most dynamic-looking poses are those which can be synthesized with just one or two lines of this kind. There is much information about using LOAs to draw human and human-like bodies in motion, but I couldn't find much about using it for animal motion, such as running horses or birds in flight seen from od angles.

So I found it very instructive to study animal photos and decide out which lines stand out in each pose for me. They are the lines which might serve as LOAs for drawing that pose. (Sorry for the unreadable notes in the pictures - these were the last sketches I did like that before sticking to uppercase.)

Solid red lines are the lines I see most prominent in the original. Dashed red lines are the ones I used, which I thought made the pose slightly better looking.

Things I noticed in these first experiments:
- Drawing with LOAs in mind is useful when using photos as references, to avoid the temptation of just copying exactly the photo.
- If at the end of the main line there is a part of the body pointing in a different direction, e.g. a muzzle or a limb, it adds to the feeling of movement. See the bats and dolphin. If the muzzles followed the solid line the bodies would look a bit too simple.
- Making a LOA turn into a spiral is necessary to draw certain animal bodies, especially when odd tails are involved. There is no way to draw a nice chamaleon using just the Blair rule of slightly curved lines...

First post!

2009-11-23T15:53:00.001-08:00

This new blog is for sharing sketches and studies. My old blog is still visible on http://scale.livejournal.com but will no longer be updated. I used to post mostly finished art there, but that wasn't very useful, so I got better organized to share pictures all the way from the initial idea to the finished piece, and also ideas which might not make it to a finished picture.

Also I did a lot of basic exercise during 2009 - life drawing, composition studies on animals, etc. - and I'll be scanning and posting them along with the current pictures. I hope this will be interesting for other artists who are facing the same problems I wonder about when I draw animals and anthro animals, for example how to exploit tails and wings for composition, how to apply the classical rules of composition to animal bodies without distorting them too much, how to make an animal's species recognizable in spite of stylization, and so on.

But first some work in progress on next painting!

In some country areas there is this stupid tradition of nailing owls to the barn doors in order to keep back the devil and ill luck. Probably it is still done in some places. Not sure how it is done in reality, but I got this idea of an owl nailed by the wings, as it reminds a lot of a cruficied human.

The preliminary sketches. Nowadays I decide almost all details of the pose with thumbnails and geometry studies like these, especially when I'm not sure about the anatomy of what I'm drawing. Started out trying to do a profile but the final version is shown at an angle so the wings and the expression can be quite visible.

Copied by sight on the canvas, on a basic desaturated underpainting. Since most of the plkumage is white I started by deciding where the highlights will go exactly. This painting is done in acrylic gouaghe. I need to work on colors so I'm using a simple palette: titanium white, PBk11 black, natural sienna, ultramarine, plus bits of quinacridone magenta.

The first approximation of shadows and main shapes, for now I'm using mostly black and white with a bit of sienna.

I lost some control after that as I'm not yet able to handle value gradients well. Also the strong highlights should have been left for later. I'll continue from here trying to improve that - also the flash of the camera is disrupting the colors though, the white and blue are not so blinding in RL!