The August 2014 CPM (Colored Pencil Magazine) "Fox Friend", with reference photo from Patricia Sue Overton, was an intriguing challenge so I decided to take it on. This time I forced myself to use a soft touch and tiny pencil strokes, which is so difficult for me! Tackling animal fur was another challenge all unto its own. This one is actually about 99% totally colored pencil, I tend to lean heavily on my art pens but in this one I purposely strove to use extremely sharp pencils for the fine details ... except for the whiskers and around the eyes.
I found some drafting vellum that Jim had brought home about 20 or so years ago and decided to use that for this piece. I like working on vellum ... it is tough and stands up to my abuse (erasing and scraping off excess pencil)! I thought I was finished with the piece yesterday and brought it down to show Jim, he looked at it and said "this is really nice, but the rear looks like a fluffy ball, not like an animal's rear haunches.". Well, I wasn't too happy about that comment and kinda huffed around a bit. Then I looked at it again and "yep" it looked more like more like a scrubbing pad ... so I put it away.
I had gotten so caught up in the pattern of twists, twirls and curves of the haunch fur that I had neglected to take highlights and color variations into consideration. As I was studying it this morning, I decided that area already had too many applications of colored pencil and determined I should try to remove excess pencil rather than add more. I took an X-acto knife in hand and slowly began gently scraping away excess pencil to reveal highlights in the fur.
I finally got to the point where I figured if I worked on it any further it would quickly go from bad to worse. I will say one thing, I am getting a bit better at animal fur yet I sure have a long way to go!
"Fox Friend" entry:
original photo by Patricia Sue Overton
Hope you like my efforts. If you'd like to point out what I could have done better ... I promise I won't "huff" but take your kind critiques into serious consideration. Thanks a bunch!
Big hugs,
Karen Anne
I found some drafting vellum that Jim had brought home about 20 or so years ago and decided to use that for this piece. I like working on vellum ... it is tough and stands up to my abuse (erasing and scraping off excess pencil)! I thought I was finished with the piece yesterday and brought it down to show Jim, he looked at it and said "this is really nice, but the rear looks like a fluffy ball, not like an animal's rear haunches.". Well, I wasn't too happy about that comment and kinda huffed around a bit. Then I looked at it again and "yep" it looked more like more like a scrubbing pad ... so I put it away.
I had gotten so caught up in the pattern of twists, twirls and curves of the haunch fur that I had neglected to take highlights and color variations into consideration. As I was studying it this morning, I decided that area already had too many applications of colored pencil and determined I should try to remove excess pencil rather than add more. I took an X-acto knife in hand and slowly began gently scraping away excess pencil to reveal highlights in the fur.
I finally got to the point where I figured if I worked on it any further it would quickly go from bad to worse. I will say one thing, I am getting a bit better at animal fur yet I sure have a long way to go!
"Fox Friend" entry:
original photo by Patricia Sue Overton
Hope you like my efforts. If you'd like to point out what I could have done better ... I promise I won't "huff" but take your kind critiques into serious consideration. Thanks a bunch!
Big hugs,
Karen Anne
