animal drawings, paintings. anyone?

thanks Osso - he's a confident little monster with a very healthy sense of self!

it's mixed media - most of my work tends to be

I started off underpainting in watercolour to get the different colours underlying the black - I mixed just burnt umber and ultramarine(blue), which make a black that you can tip towards blue or brown and a touch of cerulean blue for the parts where the light caught his fur. Oh and of course his eye colours and then background was a wash of burnt sienna very thin and mottled with white chalk pastel scribbled over it.

Then when it dried, I used charcoal to draw into it and I scratched into the paper with a craft knife to lift the thin highlights and where the light caught his black whiskers against his black fur.

I think that's all - I never plan exactly what I'll use in advance, I just pick up whatever will take the image in the way I want as I need it.

I like the different kind of marks that the different media make and the combination gives you a wider 'vocabulary'.

I had to work out ways of dealing with the fact that he is so intensely black - even his whiskers, He was sitting on a cream chair so I just kept the background simple as it shows him off quite well

Charcoal is a lovely thing to draw with even without the paint underneath. The paint adds colour though so that it isn't purely a black and white image - I'm a colourist painter.

Do you fancy trying charcoal?

That I do. I've never thought of using color under it though. Good idea.

you can use it with acrylic as well and of course pastels

Viv I have been experimenting with mixing water color, acrylics, and colored pencil. Thanks to you. Something I would have never thought of myself.

I am planning on taking some classes this winter: drawing, and a technical class. I have made a little studio in the storage room of my condo it has a door to the garden so I am hoping I can use different mediums which require ventilation. In addition I have added a ton of lights.

In the spring I will be taking an outdoor oil painting class in Balboa Park and wealth of great things to paint there. Actually Dr. Seuss, Ted Gesiel, used a lot of Balboa park scenes in the drawings for his books.

LINK TO BALBOA PARK GARDENS - SAN DIEGO, CA

Check out my Owl thread for an animal drawing

I remember my first painting class in the park.. it was a small park on Overland Avenue in West Los Angeles. I remember being totally out of it, if not for the first time in art classes (I was not the star in doing contours around hands... didn't get contours as an idea until I understood grading in landscape classes several years after my early drawing classes), but I was otherwise reasonably good at stuff... until this beginning painting class OUTSIDE. I had no clue. Sand in my painting at the beach. Let's just say my paintings in that class were expressionistic to the nth degree and I was miserable with green.

All these years later I am able to be expressionist when I want to go there and not when not, and have learned to deal with green. I never (now) use green as such, heh, I mix paint madly, in my case even on canvas, and some of that comes out greenish.

Just consider the use of fences. Have you seen any green chain link vinyl clad fences? Don't they look weird in front of a forest? Plasticky greens don't work... (my handy tip for the day...)

Oops, I see I veered from animals...

back to animals. Well, they usually aren't Green.

you are going to be BUSY! good luck with all this - will you start a thread and show your work? we can comment and encourage and maybe help?

If you haven't painted plein air before it's like osso said - a different ball game and even though you may have produced some good work indoors, being outside and keeping track of just what you are seeing, coping with the changing light, passers by, everything, is much harder at first, but keep going and you'll do fine. It leads to much better paintings. Don't be put off by any early disasters - it is to be expected until you get a bit of practice in

WOW Vivien! Beautiful pic of Paddy (?). It's great to see someone elses solution to the black-on-black problem- beautifully done.

May I ask: when using mixed media as you describe, what do you use to fix/protect your pictures when done?
I always manage to get most of the charcoal on my hands and smudges on the paper

This is an old pencil crayon of Anakin when he was just a tot and rather arrogant to boot:

Kita, thanks for sharing your work here on a2k.

It is absolutely breathtaking. No other way to describe it.

Kita that's a lovely painting and the character is so well caught. Any more to show?

I tend to use a very small amount of fixative or else none when I do mixed media pieces. Fixative does kill the pastel a little (ok for charcoal) so none in final layers. The charcoal will barely come off at all once fixed. I sometimes use hairspray as a fixative (Portal will be horrified!).

Hairspray
Funny you should mention the hairspray. It's a trick learnt when I was a student from the Fine Art students. There's a whole debate about which brand is better cos some of them are slightly yellow - which is fine in your hair and nasty on your drawing.

Ha, ha - I bet that's the LAST thing the manufacturers ever thought their product would be used for!

Thanks for the compliments superjuly!
I always cringe when I look back at older work - though I do like the pencil crayon one. But seem to overwork acrylic paintings. The one of Anakin close up on his face looks so flat to me - and that to those who don't know, tends to be the problem of working from photographs (at least for me anyway).

Which is why I just adore Viviens work (sigh). It's got all the loose, expressive movement and texture I long to get when I grow up
Maybe it's a case of why make a painting that looks just like the photograph? The whole point of a painting is that you can capture and express things differently.

Boy I do go on... more paintings/drawings from people please!

your work is really good Kita but if you want to work a bit more loosely and worry about the 3D-ness of images the best way is to sketch from life - really quick sketches that are never going to be framed - sometimes you'll only get a fraction of a pose before they move. you'll catch movement and characterstics that way.

Doing this you really learn to work out which are the most important elements to show an animals character and you'll be studying the shape of the skull, how the eyes are set, how the shoulders relate to the head etc and all this will be there in your memory when you work from a photo and really helps.

I find it very very hard to work from photos and much easier from life.