Ammonites - Complete!!

I had a bit of a vacation from doing anything art-related last week.  I was finding it too stressful to do anything in my studio, so I took that as a sign to work on other things for a while.

I'm really glad I did, because it took almost no time at all to finish the ammonite piece!

I have to apologize for the quality of the image - my cell phone isn't doing the best job right now and there's too much glare to see it properly.  

If you read my last post, you'll know that I was toying with background ideas.  I decided to leave the smooth/graded background for best effect.  I ended up using conte at the very end as the charcoal just wasn't staying on the fixative anymore.

And now on to my next project :)  I have been hoping to get to this piece before the summer was over and now I will equally hope to complete it before the summer ends!  My red poppies!!  I've already got it sketched out on the paper and I've started assembling my colours (I did mention this would be a watercolour piece, yes?  Oh.  Well it is).  

After all that drawing, I'm looking forward to some painting!

Kitty Part IV

We might actually finish this piece soon!  It can be difficult when there is so much detail to decide when you are "done".  We aren't there yet (as you will see), but I think we're in the home stretch!

I had a horrible flu this weekend so I didn't get to do any work on kitty here, but this morning went very well.  I have found in the past that if you aren't able to focus (even a little) on what you are doing then you will likely do more harm than good and you should leave it for now.  Today was a different story however, and I was able to make good progress.

So first of all, I tried the kneaded eraser to remove the offending arm.  Remember what I said about the green paper?  Ya, I noticed pretty quick that this wasn't the way to do it.  All I had was a green arm over a black body - not very realistic!  So instead, I went over the area with black conte (much better result) and used an eraser to re-shape the arm.  I had to go back to my reference photo for this.  And then I started applying the lights and darks.

I think the arm looks much more appropriate to the rest of the body shape now and even comes forward toward the viewer better.  Since I still had some time left over, I started putting in the lights and darks and shadows on the grass and leaves (right side of pic).  Instead of using a stump to blend the grey tones, I used an acrylic paint brush (natural hair) to sweep in the direction of the leaves.  The brush creates a much softer blending than the stump and I will be using it in my final application of fur on kitty (you can see that I've actually already done some on the new arm).

I'm not too happy with the leaves in the top left and I still have to do the shading, etc on the left side grass area, but we are in the home stretch now.  If I hold my breath and think it very quietly, I might even finish this week - but don't tell anyone ;)

Here kitty, kitty, kitty...

I had to take a break from the skull image for a bit.  There are some details with it that I'm trying to work out.  But in the meantime, I had this guy in my head suddenly for the last few days and thought I'd try to see what comes of it.

As you can see, I'm using a reference photo for the inspiration of this one.  It's still in the preliminary stages, but you can see that I've got the shape defined as well as the major lights and darks.  This piece is being done in conte on green canson paper. 

There's still a lot to do on it, but I'm pretty much done with the reference photo at this point.

What I will be focusing on next are the eyes.  In my opinion the eyes can make or break an image.  If you get the eyes right, viewers will forgive other minor deviations, but get them wrong and the whole image is wrong!  Unfortunately my understanding of cat eye biology is limited so I'm going to have to do some research to get them just right.  Because I like to work in a "realistic" manner, I will also double check my shape placements before continuing with the midtones, lights and darks. 

I plan to better define the grass and clover leaves so they are thick and lush-looking.  I also have to better define the light source (from the right).

Blog Update!

I have added new pics to the "Drawings" page if you are interested.  I've also added some details on what they were made with.