Durer's other hare

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.

Cross pollination

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.

Incredibly cheesy bunny

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.