I was thinking about painting an animal mother and child, and having recently seen the pandas at the Atlanta Zoo I decided to give them a try. Pandas are adorable, but it took a while to pose these two so that the dark areas wouldn’t just blend into each other. Here’s my pencil sketch:
Up to this point, I’ve been using hot press watercolor paper for my paintings because I wanted to have a smooth surface for inking. I don’t really like how the paints act on the hot press paper though, whereas the rougher cold press paper spreads and holds the paints much better, so with this painting I tried cold press. I wasn’t sure how the inking would be, but it turned out to not be a problem. I decided to build up to a dark brown rather than straight black for the dark areas of the fur, which would allow me to add some volume to the figures. I think I’m going to be using cold press from now on.
Tag: cub
Leopardess and cub
A couple of years ago, a co-worker of mine started suggesting that I should create a watercolor image of a leopard, and she has continued to suggest this at various times ever since. I like leopards (though my office isn’t filled with leopard skin patterned items as is her office) but I never seemed to be able to come up with an image of a leopard that I liked. I like to create images that tell a story, but I just couldn’t seem to find the story for this leopard. Finally, I hit upon the idea of a leopardess watching her young cub attack her tail. Using this as a starting point, I spent several days on my final sketch, using photo reference to change and refine the pose, the anatomy, the coat pattern (which I didn’t finish on purpose) and the facial expressions until I arrived at this sketch:
I didn’t intend to include the spots in my inked image, but rather planned on adding them with paint, which is why I didn’t complete the coat pattern in my sketch. I will admit to being nervous about the coloring process for this image because it is a more complex image than I’ve colored before. I started with the yellow-orange over both the leopardess and cub, then added the spots with a dark brown, and finished by adding shadows with a sort of blue-gray over top of both to sort of unite them. I was so relieved when I was done! I darkened some of the spots in Photoshop, but otherwise I was pleased with the result, and will be more confident about doing coloring like this in the future. Thanks for reading!