Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Chase The Tail

After seeing the wildlife artwork of some of the members of the Marwell International Wildlife Art Society I have been wanting to go larger. Sadly all that has happened up to now is that my waistline has expanded due to the excellent food I ate while on holiday.
However I have just started a new wildlife pastel painting using a full sheet of Sienna Pastel Card.
The size is 24 x 20 inches and I am using a mix of hard and soft pastels of several different brands.
I did the outline drawing in black pastel after doing rough sketches on cartridge paper.
I had already done the rough work before I went away and left the photographs and the cartridge paper covering some of the pastel card for a couple of weeks. The first photograph shows what happened, the card faded under the paper. After discussing this with my artist friend Katherine Tyrrell we wondered if this was due to the fact that the cartridge paper would not be acid free. If this has happened to anyone else I would be interested in knowing. I know that my drawing breaks several well established rules but I decided to give it a go anyway. What I hadn't considered was the dead space in between the two tigers, so my challenge will be to make that interesting and yet not draw the eye away from the cubs.
I started putting in some background colours using a range of Unison and Rembrandt soft pastels.
Once I had a base to work on I erased the reeds before adding the colour. I wanted them to stand out and not be contaminated by the background colours.
I continued to work on the background and made a start on the tiger.
Colours used so far are mainly as follows:-
Background:-Unison, BE7, 8 and 11, Rembrandt, Goldochre in 3 different tones, Windsor and Newton Burnt Umber tint 2 and a CarbOthello pencil 620.
Tiger:-
All the above plus CarbOthello black, Nupastels in several shades, I can't tell you the colours as my set is not labelled, Unison, orange 16 and 17 and yellow 7 and 14.
Plus a white charcoal pencil.





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