In my junior year of college I spent a semester at a simulated third-world village in Florida, learning things like how to: cook over fire, filter water, take care of various animals, butcher animals, grow vegetables in raised bed gardens, and lots of other stuff like that. As part of that, we took care of a herd of Nubian goats, which have a very istinctive look to them, and I came away from that experience with a fondness for them. A few weeks ago, i was trying to come up with ideas for things draw and decided to make a list of potential animals and types of people. I made a second list of smaller objects or actions, and then paired them with the items on the first list, resulting in some interesting combinations. Goat with watering can was one of the results. Apparently I failed to scan my initial sketch, but here’s my finished pencil drawing:
Before starting to add colors, I did some google image research on the coloration patterns of Nubian goats, and decided that I wanted a light brown goat with darker splotches and spots. Many of the goats I saw seemed to be darker towards the top of of their bodies, so I decided to paint the body of the goat wet on wet to get a nice transition of medium to light brown. This worked out pretty well, and then I was able to come in and add the coat pattern, and the body shading once it had dried. I haven’t done much wet on wet painting so it was good to do some experimenting.
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It took a lot of sketching, erasing, and frustrated sighs to come up with a final revised pencil drawing. I kept making the cat too angular, too stiff, too, just, wrong looking and I couldn’t figure out why. I finally was able to get a sleek, elegant, happy, fuzzy-looking, proportional, anatomically accurate cat sketch that in my option captured what I found adorable in my itchy-eared cat:
I can’t explain why I chose to color her as a ginger tabby, but it seemed more colorful than the gray and white of the real-life Sushi. I felt like the stripes added a nice visual element, and gave her a very warm personality. This is one of my favorites so far.
As you can see, I wasn’t sure whether to have the frog’s mouth open or closed, but overall, I stayed with this basic composition through to the finished image. Next, I added more details, figured out what the frog should look like, what the little girl should be wearing, and all that good stuff:
In my mind I saw this girl sort of as a little farm girl whose front adult teeth have just come in, so they’re very prominent. I also decided she’d be wearing overalls instead of a dress, but would be barefoot. After sitting on the image for a little while, I decided to give her teeth less definition, and make the frog’s head smaller. I also added some wrinkles to the frog’s neck where the girls hands are pressing into it, which help to give the frog a sense of weight and helps to sell idea that these two characters are interacting. Here is the finalized pencil sketch:
Now satisfied with my pencil sketch, I inked the image and made some color choices. I decided to give the girl red hair, and at the last minute gave her a bunch of freckles. The standard “shorthand” in illustrating for freckles is three dots on the cheek and maybe one on the nose, but the people I know with freckles have many, many more than that, and I wanted to try to incorporate that into this image:
Unfortunately, she looked like she had chicken pox or something. I was bummed. It was also clear that I had over-inked her hair, so the red wasn’t really showing through. I decided to re-ink the image and start over, ending up with the image at the top of the post. I made sure not to ink her hair so much, and to not make the line for the frog’s mouth so thick, and then gave her fewer freckles and made her hair a brighter shade or orange. Over all, I think the image is better for it. Well, that’s the story of this image…thanks for stopping by!
Once I had inked this image and done a bit of Google research on the specifics of basset hound coloration, I used a little wet-on-wet technique to blend some gray into the various brown spots. I’m still experimenting with how best to do this, but I like the results this time around. Here are my inks for this image (you’ll notice that I changed the position of the left eye in the final image using photoshop to make him look less googly-eyed):
Upon review, I realized that his arms were too long, and his legs were too short. I also decided to give the frog a smug look instead of a disgruntled look, as if he’s now used to being carried around by this monk, and is pleased that he’s found what he considers to be “the sweet life.” I redrew this image to incorporate these changes, and liked the results a lot more. I then did some google image research to see what Tibetan monks wear, and discovered that the fabric is wrapped around the body much more than I had drawn it, and there was often a big piece that draped down their front which would provide me the opportunity to put in a lot of interesting wrinkles and folds, so I updated his clothing. Here is my pencil sketch:
