"Epona harnessed" finished

I'm not too enthusiastic about the result, this picture hits almost all my current technical limits, but it served its purpose well. I learned quite a lot on handling saturation both by mixing various grays (in the ground and puddles) and by alternating layers of complementary colors (on the body).

Before trying again complicated poses and point of view like this one I feel the need to go back for a while to practice anatomy and improve my palette choices. I'll be starting soon a sketchbook on ConceptArt.org as now I'm exercising steadily every day and I need most of all to work with more continuity. The best studies and speed paintings I'll keep posting here too (along with WIPs of full pictures of course).

"Epona Harnessed" WIP 2

I wanted this picture to be a hard exercise at controlling saturation, so I'm keep it very low except for the most exposed areas of moss-skin. Most of the picture at this point is Van Dyck brown and Payne's gray, with the reddish part being burnt sienna. I'm now covering that with the layers of green and green/yellow, though it will require adjusting later to make the transition from shadow to light smoother, for example on the visible leg.

The thing on her butt is going to be a still smoking fire brand. Horses are branded all the time so it's logical whoever is keeping her tied also wants to mark her as his property.

Phtalo green I find to be the hardest hue to handle along with ultramarine. They are the hardest to mix, due to green overwhelming any other color even when added in small quantities and ultramarine causing sudden hus shifts and losing its hue and turning muddy very easily. But green is also terribly hard to glaze as it tends to turn opaque and lose a lot of strength when dried. Altough it might be due to traces of titanium white or some other pigment in my brand of choice - the great guide to paints by Bruce MacEvoy explains similar issues but it's often hard to tell whether the paint's brand has a quality issue or the pigment is just limited in that way.

Speed paintings are excellent way to test palettes and paints, so I'm doing more of them as warm-ups. Not yet doing one a day but that's what I'm aiming for now.

Alex the parrot

I've been thinking for a while of making a picture of Alex the parrot, now I'm cooking what might be the right idea.

This is a slightly anthropomorphic version of him, with hands, bird-like backward knees, and a body shape similar to that of the owl from Harvest Moon. He is in the lab sitting upon a perch, in front of one of the magnetic boards he used in exercises with letters and numbers, but this time he is ready to actually write (with one of his own tail feathers). Other objects are a bird cage (top left) and a studio lamp (the top right things are the arm and the lampshade):

The plush lion is there for a reason: the picture is modeled after icons of Saint Jerome, the patron of translators and writers and translator of one of the most important editions of the Bible who was often portrayed with a lion. I think the role this parrot has had in improving the communication between humans and animals is worth being remembered among the highest and most important.

By a lucky accident the color red is also associated with Saint Jerome - and there is even a picture where the Saint appears with an African gray parrot like Alex:

"Epona Harnessed" WIP 1

I removed the antlers she had in the sketches because they didn't look good for the composition (they would be too mmuch prominent given the pose and add too much weight at the bottom of the picture), and also because they didn't make much sense in this context. Epona is the deity of horses anyway... I'll paint proper deer another time.

Epona is lying on muddy ground between two puddles which will show reflected clouds and trees. This time I'm using more natural/desaturated colors and the underpainting is low saturation too, a mix of ochre, burnt Sienna, neutral gray and phtalo green. There are three main areas:

1) The challenge with the ground is giving it the wet/muddy feeling and keeping the saturation very low. I've started with a mix of Van Dyck brown and Payne's gray, and later layers will be the same plus white and possibly bits of other hues.
2) Epona is going to be mostly cool gray and green/yellow - she doesn't have fur but a coat of moss and grass, with the mane and tail made of long leaves like these of some swamp plants. I've started with a layer of red (burnt Sienna) as underpainting for the greenest areas and Payne's gray for the shadows.
3) The reflected sky will be the lightest area, the color will be similar to the mud's but overall cooler and much lighter. Plus some accents of orange on the clouds to balance the green of Epona. The main challenge here is painting a convincing surface texture for the water, but I also want to paint an interesting contrast between the mud and the sky, to make the scene look firmly on the ground and yet suspended in the sky at the same time.