Roadmap

Currently painting the Epona picture and working on other ideas, especially two:

- As a teen I spent several happy summers in Ibiza along with my parents. Ibiza is mostly known as a party place but the northern part of the island is very tranquil, with a lot of Mediterranean bush and half-wild areas, and it is traditionally a beacon of European hippy culture. There are a few hippy shops and markets which sell oddities too. Most of it is cheap mass-produced stuff, but sometimes I found items which could not be found anywhere else 20 years ago, such as religious postcards from India:

Avatar of the elephant god Ganesha

These icons are full of details which have a symbolic meaning or reference some Hindu religious stories. I'm thinking of a painting in a similar style, with a feline avatar holding slightly different/modified symbolic items representing virtues and facts of the XXI century world:

I had thought of a tiger but that would be too obvious, and also not good because tigers are a very negative symbol in hinduism, while this is supposed to be a firendly deity. She is going to be a snow leopard instead. Nowadays we are kinda obsessed with bringing rare and obscure things to the spotlight, and snowmeows are rare and obscure animals which have become famous only in the last fifty years or so. They look "edgy" for some reason, probably because of the cold/pale colors. Also they manage to keep some privacy in the wild in spite of all the people who want to film them, which nowadays is quite an achievement. :-)

- Another idea comes from a recent streak of good books and documentaries about food and the risk of a global food crisis in the near future, for example BBC's Jimmy's Global Harvest, Jimmy's Food Factory and Future of Food. These are videos everybody should watch, as in 10-20 years it will be extremely important to have a good start and understanding of the situation.

The idea started again as a fantasy scene. I was rather impressed by the description of cattle feedlots in the book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan and it led to a weird vision of a feedlot as a shady cathedral. The idea was to show a pregnant cattle smoking hard and looking very distressed in such a setting, oppressed by tall corn containers which formed a monumental, grim architecture, as in some paintings by Zdzislaw Beksinski:

The cow would be sitting in front of a large crate with such corn towers in the background:

I even figured out a logo which looks like a Christian cross for the fictional corporation which owns the place and has corn as its core business:

I was thinking of using a style similar to Beksinski's, morbid and apocalyptic. But such a scene would be cheesy and useless, it'd be just empty rethoric. So I'm keeping the elements I like - the pregnant cow, the feedlot looking like a cathedral - but I'm dropping the grim atmosphere. The cow won't look distressed but rather soothed by smoking and just a bit apathetic/resigned. The feedlot will look rather polished like the engineering achievement it is. There will be a crows of other cows too. I have a very specific atmosphere in mind for this painting, a bit surreal, not easy to describe in words... I'll just have to show it as I go on.

A small Gauguin parody and study

Still studying color theory and making color tests like crazy. I did a small painting for the friends of  the FurryMania forum based on Gauguin's "Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao tupapau)". The colors are based on a photo which is probably quite different from the original (most other photos are not so green and less saturated), but I liked the photo's green/sienna contrast so I used that. The hoopoe Greta is a character by Sans Souci (take a look at her cool sketch blog!).

Studying the details of Gauguin's painting was interesting. Here he curved the border of the sheets to make the foot almost tangent with it, softening the contrast between the foot and the sheet border. The foot would have broken the border too strongly without the little curve I marked here. The fold under the feet adds variety in the middle of the fruits/flowers pattern below, and adds detail to the area to balance the detailed cushions area.

On the girl's head the bed's border becomes very thin, shifting the viewer's attentio to the figure's face. I tired to keep this effect along the hoopoe's crest.

In the original the shape of the bed sheet is broken by the orange cushion. This is a detail I omitted but it was a mistake because it was very important: it connected the girl's dark shape with the dark background by breaking the bed's border and this adds a lot of depth to the bed, balancing the effects of the loose perspective and shading. In my version the sheet is too striking and the hoopoe looks almost floating in the void. I realized it before finishing but the cushion area was already cluttered because of the boar and there was little room to fix the mistake. A lesson learned.

As seen in the grayscale version the orange cushion is an intermediate value between the light and the dark shapes around it, resulting in a very harmonious values map.

The animal on the background of the original is probably an ox with an oxpecker on top of it - I couldn't find any information about it - but at first glance it looked like a boar with a long ear, and since the forum has a boar mascotte too I turned it into a boar. The curves on the far right of the original may also be the backs of other oxes grazing.

Studies from 2009 - Breaking up cetacean profiles

Quadrupeds are hard to draw because their shapes are very complex while birds and cetaceans have the opposite problem: their shapes look very simple, but they are actually full of subtle curves, and without such subtleties they lose a lot.

Their profile may look a like it can be drawn with a single continuous line. Sometimes it's possible, but the result often feels stiff and lifeless to me, it's just too "designy"/oversimplified. This happens specially in dynamic poses, as real cetaceans have muscles and fat tissue shifting all the time and creating small changes in their profile depending on the movement they are doing.

So I've become used to sketch cetaceans and birds trying to break up the profile into many lines, obviously trying to keep them consistent with the actual variations in the curves of their body. Trying to keep them tangent to the curves seems a good strategy to study their bodies and get a feeling of where the subtleties lie. The results seem lively enough in spite of the hard angles.

"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.