Progress on Lucy

I tend to procrastinate quite a bit once I start a new piece of art because to me it's not a hobby and it's not relaxing, it's work...and sometimes it is a labour, but in case you might misunderstand me...it is a labour of love and something I have to do!

I'm finally getting into the groove with Lucy and making some progress. Creating a pet portrait in coloured pencil is a tedious process at the start (at least my process is) and it takes time to work out the colours and get comfortable enough with them to work along without confusion. When you are working with a handful of pencils, or a lapful in my case, it is so easy to grab the slightly wrong colour when working in a similar value and colour range as it is with most fur. And then there is the sharpening factor...the pencil must always be needle sharp to get the best laydown, so I am always sharpening, sharpening, sharpening which disrupts the flow from eye to hand. Never the less, it eventually starts to move along and gets comfortable.

On my lap while working on her fur is FC Brown Ochre, Bistre, and Burnt Sienna and from Prismacolour I am using White, Black, Ginger root, Light Umber, Sand, Chocolate, and Sepia. I expect I will stay predominately with these pigments for the rest of the piece, I might need a few more or a few different pencils if something isn't working but most of the difficult decisions have been made.

I have some family obligations the next few days so I will have to leave her for the moment, the weather forcast is calling for more rain on the weekend so I will probably continue with her then.

I've also put a few more pics up on my Birds etc page.

Cheers!
J

Lucy is taking her time

Well, as I thought, I spent most of the last 2 weeks doing things other than in the studio working on Lucy or another wildlife painting I have on the easel.  We decided to take a few days and head out to Rondeau which is our favorite Provincial Park and a hot spot of activity during the spring migration of birds.

Unfortunately we got there a bit early this year to experience any big waves of warblers or other migrating birds but we still had a great time as always and I am happy with the pics that I did get.  I did take Lucy along to work on (and the real Lucy went with us of course) but after spending morning, afternoon and early evening walking the trails with 10 lbs of camera, lens and binnies around my neck the cozy little bedroom in the back of our Airstream was calling to me.....

So that I don't mess up the flow of WIP posts of my work I have set up a separate page for some of my bird and wildlife photos.  You might see some of them reappear someday as a painting or drawing!

...it is back to being cold and very, very wet again which means no gardening this week unless the weather forcast is very wrong :-) so I should have more of Lucy to show you this week!

Cheers
J 

a bit of progress on Lucy

Just a little bit to show you since the last post, I had to spend most of the week preparing for my "Pet Portrait" class at the C2C convention in Toronto....the class went great, and all the students did a remarkable job on their kitty.  I am always so happy to see more artists turned on to the fun of working with coloured pencils!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As I thought there just weren't one or 2 pencils that I could put together to get the "right " colour for our golden Lucy dog, in fact she has been causing me quite a bit of trouble!  I tried this combination of pencils, Nope! and then another combination of pencils, Nope!...take it off and and try again, and then once again when I finally found the right combination that I feel gives an accurate rendering of her true colour.
 I ♥ my electric eraser!

I finally hit on the right combination of 8 pencils after 4 tries...sometimes it just takes a while when working with a translucent media like coloured pencils to get not only the right pigments but getting them layered in the right order.

you can see all my scribbles on the paper and at the top is the combination that finally got it right...at least for this section of her fur, I know that I will have to make adjustments as I work through the light and dark areas.

The spring migrants are really starting to arrive now, I was greeted this morning by the sweet sounds of a native White Crowned sparrow calling outside our bedroom window, and upon rising noticed a few White throated sparrows, a number of female Purple finches and one female Rose Breasted grosbeak at the feeders as well. If the weather is good, I will probably be outside for most of the week taking photos or working in the gardens, hopefully I will still have some energy to work on Lucy in the evenings!

Lucy

I sometimes have a hard time deciding what I should begin next, I have so many good photos to choose from I spend hours just going through them and never make a decision :-)

This time I finally decided to make an attempt at our own golden dog Lucy. She is 5 years old and a great joy to us, although she is rather spoiled and strong willed...(that's her daddys fault)

 Lucy reference photo

I can pretty well tell if the rendering is going to be successful once I get the eyes and nose finished, so far she is looking pretty good. Lucy is going to be a bit of a challenge to get her golden colouring just right, there isn't just one or 2 pencils that are the right hue so I will have to do quite a bit of swapping colours as I work.

Weather! and some spring migrants

Is winter every going to end?  Usually at this time of year I am out in the garden all day, every day but this year winter just doesn't want to go away. Although I have been able to spend a few hours out doing a bit of weeding and cleaning up, the continual rain/snow/rain and cold temps are making it difficult to get things done in the garden and the thought of planting anything in the soaking wet, cold ground is just not on the books just yet.

There seems to be a disconcerting weather pattern building with every weekend having the worst weather of the week...not good for those who work! 3 weekends ago we had a tremendous hail storm that caused a good deal of damage to our property. Broken windows, smashed flowers, and a great deal of damage to our vehicle and our beloved Airstream which had me picking up golf ball sized hail stones and bits of branches from the carpet in our bedroom!

Last weekend I taught another beginner Coloured Pencil class at Liz Garcia's studio in Mississauga ON.  We had a full house in Liz's beautiful studio, and I think we were all happy to have something to occupy our time indoors as the wind and lashing rain outdoors wasn't very pleasant. I thought we had some hope while driving home that evening, as by the time we arrived home the temp had risen from a steady 4 degrees for the day up to 11 degrees.  Unfortunately the wind turned from the north again and by morning everything was white once again!

Regardless of the weather some of the spring migrants are making their way north. This week saw the arrival of a few purple finches mixed in with a large flock of goldfinches who are busy fussing with the resident finches who spend the winter with us.

This fellow is "ripening" nicely! Some are very yellow and almost completely finished with their moult into breeding colours, and others are still rather motley looking!

This male Purple finch is glorious! He was much brighter and obviously the dominant male of the group, I brightened this photo because it was such a gloomy day but didn't alter the colours at all.  I saw him in the crap apple tree this morning, along with one female purple finch...their nesting range is a bit farther north than we are but maybe this year they are having other thoughts about moving on!

We have also had a pair of chipping sparrows arrive, we usually have one or two pairs of them spend the season with us in the neighbourhood but I have no idea if these are "our" chipping sparrows or just some that are taking advantage of our abundant bird feeders.  I know I took a pic of one yesterday...it must still be in my camera so I will save it for another post.

I read that hummingbirds have been sighted back in Ontario, it seems rather silly to be putting out feeders for them when there is a good chance the feeder may freeze up, but if they are here, there isn't much else available for them to eat...so I will be hanging out my feeder this afternoon and I might as well hang the Oriole feeder at the same time...the last 2 years we have had Baltimore and Orchard orioles in the yard just about now...although I love seeing them I hope this year they are lingering somewhere farther south where it is warm!

I will be back soon with some more bird photos, a photo page and also an update on what I have on the drawing board right now.

Chipping sparrows are the only "native" sparrows that tend to nest in our garden or close by, although we do get visits from many other types of native sparrows that stop off for some food on their way to summer nesting areas. American tree sparrows and song sparrows are often around in early spring and sometimes a fox sparrow will drop in, although they never stay more than a day. In a while I expect we will see White crowned and White throated sparrows....you have to be looking for them in amongst all the English sparrows that dominate the feeders!

Cheers!
J

Simon is finally finished!

I am happy to say that Simon is finally off the drawing board and I think he looks terrific!  After completing his copper name tag and green collar I started back in on his orange tabby fur...work a bit with cream, then swap out a few strokes of Sandbar, then some PolyChromos Raw Umber, maybe a few strokes of Light Umber, Sepia, Sienna Brown, Chocolate or Burnt Sienna...and then add some more Cream or White and start it all again, sharpening every few strokes to make sure that each hair is well defined.

He is almost finished here, I have completed all but the final "smoothing and polishing" to the fur on the right side of his chest.  The last step for this area was to finally pick up the Colourless Blender Pencil  and do a light, all over scumble...following the direction of the pencil strokes. I use Normal pressure to apply the blender, and just smooth and blend the pencil layers together. Then, since I have not used heavy pressure that would compact the tooth of the paper I can still go back and apply a few random strokes of cream, white or one of the darker values and then everything just pops!

His whiskers are added - gee, he has a lot of whiskers and some of them start out black and then turn white along the length. I cheat and use thinned acrylic paint and a very fine liner brush to paint the whiskers...so much easier than trying to indent and keep the white pencil white.

a close up of his pretty green/yellow eyes

and another close up of his copper name tag and the soft blended multi layered appearance of his fur.

I hope you like Simon as much as I enjoyed working on him!

Cheers!
J

Coloured Pencils and Paul Simon...

As pretty as the little pansy ATC card that I posted previously is, it was created as a specific project to teach beginner students about working with coloured pencils and I used a very limited palette of only the 3 primary colours plus white and a blender.

My usual method is to incorporate as many of the pigment colours available to me as is necessary and depending on the subject I am rendering that could be anywhere from 10 to 20 to 30 or more different pencils! My goal is rich, saturated, full spectrum layers of colour that accurately reflects the true colour of the subject no matter what it is I am rendering.

I have a lot of coloured pencils to choose from, I currently work from full sets of 3 different brands of pencils. Prismacolors are my go-to brand and come in 132 luscious colours. They are a wax based pencil.

Aren't they gorgeous! Who wouldn't want to use all of them?

I also use Polychromos which are an oil based pencil. I had to order the full set from the US when I bought these because I hadn't been able to find them locally.... and then of course I hoarded them since they were difficult for me to replace, but I have recently found a local art store in K-W that carries them in open stock!   mmmmm 120 soft buttery colours...

and I have been using wax based Derwent Coloursoft pretty well since they came on the market in Canada ...they seem to be becoming very popular and are available at many locations open stock. They come in 72 colours.

I like to keep my sets full at all times as reference to what colours are available to me and then I know for sure that I have at least one extra pencil if I need it. I also have a leather zip travel case of Prisma's that I usually work from and then extras of all brands I keep in a carousel in my studio.

.....getting back to what I was originally going to talk about today :-)

This is (Paul) Simon who has been on my drawing board since before Christmas! He is a family pet, and I unfortunately had to put him aside to work on other projects. I usually don't keep too detailed of records while I am working unless I plan to use the piece for demonstration purposes

...for Simon I noted what colours I had used for his nose, 13 in all, and for his eyes 14 colours in all. Now I am into the later stages of his beautiful fur and depending on the colour and value (creamy or white, beige or tan, orange or golden and light or dark) I usually have between 5-8 colours in my hand constantly changing with every few strokes. There are about 15 fur colours in one box I where I keep pencils in use.  

My list has 40 different pencils I have used so far on Simon, I am now working on his collar and metal name tag and I know that I have pulled a few greens and others out of my case to render the chrome and copper accurately.

I will show you a couple of updates of Simon as I complete him, he has been "half a cat" for way to long, I want to get him done and framed so I can scratch him off my to do list and get going on something new!

Cheers!

J