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.

Fur rendering in oils

After the avatar painting and a few other tests I have a viable pipeline for working with oils. It's quite simple actually:

1) Pencil sketch
2) Underpainting in acrylics
3) Final color in oils

I used to do digital value studies for all pictures before coloring them in acrylics but that's no longer necessary now, I can design the values directly in the underpainting layer and the oil layer will mask any small mistake or change of mind. I guess I also developed a better intuition for values so I need less preliminary studies, but breaking up the work by doing some steps in digital and some steps in traditional media doesn't help concentration. For simple pictures where there is no background I'd rather do as much as possible on the canvas/sheet, it also saves a lot of time.

Rendering soft-looking fur is always one of my top priorities. Because of that I leave figure borders a bit blurred unless a neat border is necessary to make the picture readable, as in the detail picture above under the chin. Many anthro characters have complex patterns of stripes, spots and brighter/darker areas of fur which make it really difficult to keep the figure readable at a glance. Complementary underpainting is of great use here: even if the colors painted over it are quite different from each other (in this case they ranged from dark brown to dark blue to cool gray and white) the same color is visible in trasparency in all parts of the figure, so there is a nice color unity.

Crosshatching is also very useful to suggest softness. Many anthro artists who want to paint relistic fur resort to painting the individual hairs, but that creates a lot of regular detail all over the figure and looking at so much regularity quickly becomes tiresome for the eye. I prefer the slight randomness of crosshatching, which makes the surface look soft but also relatively smooth.

Also crosshatching doesn't need to follow the expected direction of hairs in every spot of the fur coat, so the strokes may follow any direction which is useful to enhance the volumes and the lines of action in the image. In the details above I directed the brush strokes on the shoulder, arm and torso so that they would enhance the muscle volumes and the arm's line of action.

Reboot

Time to restart the blogs. Ill luck struck me during 2011 as I had to face several health issues which drove me away from large projects like paintings, and it took a while to find the will to react to them. Now things are going well enough I guess. I revised my life priorities making more room for drawing and painting and I'm working steadily towards a more professional approach now. During most of 2011 I chose to focus on small commissions so I could learn the basics of art business and time management and also do a lot more exercise on coloring. Now I'm actually beginning to feel confident with palette choices, at least for smaller pictures.

I've tried oil painting too and I'm switching to it immediately for paintings, I'll keep acrylics ust for illustrations on paper. I always though oils were the most difficult media to handle but it turns out that most of the effects I failed to achieve with acrylics are easier to achieve with oils. Finally complementary underpainting which WORKS! Painting wet-in-wet with oils is just more fit for my mindset, I like to have time to think between brush strokes. It's also much easier to fix small mistakes.

My first large oil painting will be the Hindu-like avatar picture which has been patiently waiting for over two years. I've already made a small color test in oils. Still a few details to add or correct but this time it's a reasoned and thorough color test, unlike the improvised crap which was the previous test with acrylics.



Full version already started, with underpainting in acrylics to spare some time. This one along with the following 1-2 paintings will be my first exhibited painting in a collective exhibition in May.