As I’m just sorting out a print of my Big 75 animals pic (available to buy here), I thought I’d show my process of it. I wanted to do a landscape full of animals and after stirring my brain with a spoon for a while I decided to sort the animals according to where they might be found.
- Sky
- Mountains
- Trees
- Land
- Underground
- Water
The basic idea in mind, I began doing a whole of preparatory sketches of the various animals I would like to use. Some didn’t seem to work and therefore didn’t make the final image (sorry meerkats).
Generally I redrew each animal from my sketches for the final piece, but in the case of the sea otter below, I was happy with my sketch so I actually traced it on to the final work.
Liberties with scale and geography were taken in favour of composition!
After a rough plan I worked on the final piece in pencil on A2 paper.
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Then on to Inking, using 3 & 4 Pro Arte Prolene brushes, a dip pen and Daler Rowney FW Black ink…
After a while I noticed my brushes were a little worn. The inking around the gorilla and yak are a bit muddy.
So I went out and bought some nice new brushes to complete the job.
I decided to add a cricket on the far right tree. Just felt like it needed this to balance the composition.
I messed up the lion’s toes a bit.
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On to colouring. I planned to work in watercolour (my really old set of watercolours to be precise) and limit my colour palette. I chose my colours by using the hi-tech method of painting little rectangles of the potentials on a sketch book page then covering up ones with little bits of paper until I’m left with a pleasing combination.
I also marked the colours in my watercolour set with little bits of post-its, coz I’m more than likely to forget which ones to use otherwise.
The ink I used was waterproof so it doesn’t run when adding the paint.
Down goes the first layer of watercolours.
Building up the colours. Somehow I managed to spill a couple of drops of blank ink on the larger turtle.
At some point I had to tone down the colour of the underground tunnels by removing some of the brown with wet cotton buds. There’s no Undo with watercolours.
After scanning the complete work into Photoshop, I touched up the spilled ink on the turtle and the lion’s feet goof up… and we’re done!
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