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.

"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 5

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

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:

"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!