"Shadows" finished

I'm aware that dazzle painting is probably not very useful for hunting rabbits, but I still find it cooler than symmetrical tribal paintings and such! It might actually provide some camouflage in a thick undergrowth. In future maybe I'll paint that on a cetacean.

Some kinds of dazzle painting actually made use of strong colors, even red like the vixen's fur:

"Shadows" WIP 2

Gave priority to this smaller picture while I meditate about the hues needed by the owls and the horse goddess.

I started with a thin underpainting of ultramarine and burnt sienna, but the hues didn't look quite right on the background, so I started covering it with a rather thick layer of paint and I think it will hide it completely. In the end the palette is just phtalo blue 15:3, burnt sienna, titanium white and little bits of cadmium yellow light. The range of hues and values which can be done with just phtalo + sienna is amazing, it looks like many more colors are being used rather than just two.


I need to give more sense of volume and depth in my pictures, so I experimented with a few technique which improve the illusion of depth. In this case I'm painting the background forest slightly blurred while the fox will be mostly well focused. It's a very basic technique for adding depth, and needs to be done with care because it's very very easy to overdo it and make the background look messy and fake. In this case though I think it should work fine along with the scattered light through the leaves coming from the background plane itself. The blur should add to the light effect to create the impression of a slightly hazy atmosphere.

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...