~ sketchblog, art process, animals & occasional random items of personal interest
This is a little Photoshop exercise using a doodle from one of my sketchbooks.
This creature needs a name along the lines of this fish – the sarcastic fringehead. The sarcastic fringehead was on the recently aired ‘Fish’ episode of David Attenborough’s Life and I’m not sure what delights me more – its name or its looks.
Here’s another clip of a pair of battling sarcastic fringheads.
For the Illustration Friday topic Entangled.
I’m starting to experiment a little with approaches to colour for the book I’m working on. I’m neck deep in working the drawings out still so I haven’t allowed myself to fully delve into playing with ink and paint yet. But this was a quick little 15 minute thing I whipped up this morning. After labouring over getting drawings right, it’s nice to just ignore that aspect completely and just play with an idea.
I did a little bit of work on these back at home without the distraction of the scenery. I darkened the water a little in both pieces, and did a couple of additions to foliage in the background of the rocks painting. I find I fall in love too much with some of the things in the actual scenery and they don’t alway add to the painting. So to come home and do a bit of touching up in the studio is sometimes helpful – I can concentrate on eliminating things that don’t serve a purpose and accentuating nice little paint accidents. But things can sometimes go the other way and get overworked. And there’s a danger of losing the essence of a sketch done in the field. These are just sketches, in the end. Not meant to be anything but exercises. If I have to paint 200 bad paintings to finally get a good one, I’ve got about 180 of these to go.
The canyon was about the coolest place to be yesterday. While I painted an odd mist would drift down the river, covering up the reflections, and bring cool air with it. Then it would disappear again and the temperature would rise slightly. People came down to the water to jump off the rocks and play with their dogs in the freezing water. And then they’d leave and the surface of the water would get glassy once again.
From my vacation last weekend.
Sketches from a trip back in June.
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