Next painting: Puffins!

I think I found a good pipeline for working in oils but I posted about that in the NSFW side of the blog.

The next painting will be my anthro puffin character Angelica posing in the acquarium where she works along with some non-anthro puffins. It's supposed to be part of a classy advertising campaign she does for the Genoa Aquarium of the future where she works. I guess I have weird ideas about the future of marketing. :-)

I'll use strong colors for this one. In the last year I've been focusing obsessively on desaturated colors so I could better understand and learn color temperature, but I actually prefer bright, sunny and weird colors in paintings.

A proper model sheet of Angelica is on its way too.

Tough seabirds

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.

Good bird, bad bird

 

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.

"I remember" done

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

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).

A hooting dancer

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.

A small Gauguin parody and study

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.

"Harvest Moon" finished

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.

"Harvest Moon" WIP 4 + sketches

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.

Owl feathers and facial masks

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:

"Harvest Moon" WIP 1

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:

Studies from last year - More line of action ideas

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

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

First post!

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!