"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:

Figurines

Back from a day of fundraising for the WWF. My local group is selling animal figurines crafted in Ecuador from dried nuts of the Tagua tree. Some of them are quite interesting because you can tell exatly which species they are, in spite of being exotic animals stylized in an unusual way.

This is a very recognizable frigate bird. The dots on the front even remind the sparse feathers seen at the borders of the bird's air sac when it is inflated:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Male_Frigate_bird.jpg

This is especially interesting. The black spots are enough to make me think of an orca immediately, even though the orca pattern is very different from this one. Without the spots it would look like a weird generic whale, but the most well known cetacean with a visible black pattern is the orca, so even a small spot immediately reminds of it. The rounded forehead and the shape of the muzzle also are very similar to an orca's, even thought the proportions of the rest of the body are warped.

A porcupine. I don't know them well enough to tell if it's one species in particular but it's carefully carved to show that the spikes only cover the front part of the body.

The design of this one is just amazing. I wonder how many western artists could come up with such a beautiful stylization of an insect. There were two kind of grasshopper figurines, very similar but with different heads, so again I wouldn't be surprised if they were based on two particular species from Ecuador. They show well that the author is familiar with all sort of critters and is used to observe them closely.

Studies from last year - More line of action ideas

That's a tern photographed with a high speed camera. She was caught during an extremely complex movement which involves most parts of her body, and that's the kind of motion which makes a tern look like a master of flight and not a chicken. They are probably the most skilled fliers in the world along with hawks and owls.

How do you even begin to study poses like this one?

These were my early attemps to extract LOAs from photos of birds (last part of the batch of sketches with crappy text, I swear!):

When birds are perched the tail is often an important line.

I tried to reduce each pose to a minimum number of lines (in red, the red number is the lines count). But the resulting stick figure has nothing to do with the original, if you look at the red lines alone you could never tell they represent a bird during a wing beat...

Often the most visible lines of birds in flight are the edges of wings and in fact birds are often simplified like this:

That's easy to recognize but also very anonymous. The supreme elegance of the tern's wingbeat is gone.

These are new from yesterday, tried again with the tern photo:

BIRDS EVERYWHERE

The right one is the best I got so far, I'd start from a scheme like this to design a tern in flight. It's very different from a classic LOAs scheme, but it's just three lines and it keeps the lines and proportions I see as most evident in the photo. The left one looks odd because the wing line on the right is too parallel to the body line; both the left one and the center one show the body too large so it doesn't look like a tiny bird at all.

"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