Antarctic seal, finished

Well here she is! Must say I've enjoyed this one. Beautiful colours gorgeous textures, thanks Mum and Dad for supplying me with a great photo. One day I would love to get to the Antarctic too, in the mean time I've all my parents photos to paint!

Seal wip day3

I've started to work in stronger tones today, lots of blues and greys. I need to reshape the top of her nose, I hadn't notice it was out until I loaded the photo on blogger. Photos are a great tool to enable you to spot mistakes! Not too sure what to do with the background. I was going to hint the sea, but now I'm thinking a darker tone, I quite like the warmth of the brown. The pebbles that he'll eventually lie on have lots of warm tones, as well as greys.

Seal wip, day 2

I'm really enjoying this, playing with different colours in the fur to create the sheen on it. The pastels that I'm using for this are so soft you can almost move them around the paper, you can certainly mix colours on the paper as if you're using a palette for paint.

I feel sometimes I get overally bogged down in the details, the soft pastels are great, its just not possible to get too fussy with them. You can get a sharp edge on them but it doesn't last very long.

Off to the Antarctic

Wish I literally was, the heat this Summer is starting to melt my brains! My parents a few years back went there, and took some lovely photos. It lovely to use a photo that wasn't taken in a zoo, but in the seal's natural habitat. Their eyes are reflective like a pair of mirror sunglasses, you can see the surrounding landscape perfectly reflected in them. There is ice in the seals nostrils where it's breath has frozen, you can feel the cold.

I've started this with bold loose blocks of colour using a very soft pastel on pastelmat paper(A3). There are some fantastic textures the smoothness of the sleek seal's fur, contrasting with the pebbles it's laying on. It's great to be working looser again!