Panic signs

 

I just learned that the looks of oil paint varies a lot more than I expected depending on the kind of surface, the kind thinner used to rinse brushes, and even the size of brushes and brush strokes. In spite of all coloring tests I still tend to panic about some details, especially in the early stages of painting when a color mix looks different from what I expected.


Here I panicked a bit while painting the first layer of green behind the throne because it looked much more opaque and saturated compared to the miniature test, and as a result the brushwork looks dull. Around the lamp the color looked OK and the brushwork is much more natural:

When using acrylics a mistake in the underpainting is a big deal, but luckily with oils it is much easier to blend further layers of paint with the first ones even after a few days. So there is no point in worrying about subtle nuances of color in the early stages.

This is a later stage where the green area is still too flat but the colors are beginning to fall into place. I haven't used any black: all the dark areas are a very dark violet which I'm also using to darken the other colors where needed. When painted thick this violet becomes almost black, but it remains translucent so it sends nice violet reflections when light hits the surface. Being complementary to the green and yellow of the throne's outline it should make for a more interesting color scheme in the end.

Seagulls WIP, brush strokes

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...

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.

Alex the Mastermind

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.