Progression

An idea I put together in a couple days, originating from a half-lucid dream. There were anthro foxes who painted their fur with lots of black forming a sort of disruptive camouflage pattern, something similar to dazzle painting for ships. So I looked for a nice scene illustrating the concept. This is the sequence of thumbnails and sketches, from the first attemtps to find a nice pose to the copy I'm going to color.

Picture 3 is the same size of 4-5 and was supposed to be the proper sketch, instead it's what happens when I try to draw hastily and without really reasoning about the pose... a mess. Picture 4-5 are basically the same done with more patience and thinking carefully about every line and volume. The difference is worth the effort, but it's really hard to stay focused at times...

"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.

Portrait of Bluefire

A portrait of chakasa Bluefire done as a present for my good friend leonardo. Bluefire works as an Environmental Restorer, a rather difficult job which is basically fixing/cleaning up the mess left by the late industrial age, back when earthlings deluded themselves that the planet's resources could be exploited without limits.

Most of hir job revolves around slowly restroing soil fertility and biodiversity into barren areas, so that in a few centuries they can produce something again. Here however shi is just taking a pause into a recently burned down wood, where new saplings are beginning to grow back.

Acrylics on board. Unluckily no WIPs for this as I was very unsure while painting it and thought I'd have to restart any time, so I didn't make photos of the various stages... I really need to get past this stupid worrying. Also because now I'm able to correct most mistakes along the way.

For the palette I used many colors but the main components for the background are violet and phtalo green, the rest is various shades of gray done with combinations of blacks (Mars and ivory, the latter has the lowest value), titanium white, ultramarine, Van Dyck brown and yellow ochre.

More 30 minute sketches

The next posts will be more about anthros, WIPs and annotated sketches, but in the meanwhile I think sharing these exercises is useful too. They are not very funny to do, so it's better to do them inbetween other stuff rather than diving head first into them, but they teach a lot of things which I wouldn't feel comfortable trying in a proper picture. All of these are acrylics on paper with classical limited palettes of 3-4 colors (for most of them Yellow ochre, burnt sienna/Van Dyck brown, titanium white, ivory black).

For the animals I started from photos which look very static and I tried to add some feeling of movement using the direction of strokes:

For landscapes I'm doing mostly value studies, trying ways to render things like tangled branches and mist:
(This is an ice cliff painted with an odd palette of white, black, ultramarine, and cadmium red for the shadows.)

Also some loose drawings, mostly exercises to keep the species recognizable in spite of stylization or parts of the body being hidden: