Enjoying The Process
Top: Initial Drawing
Left Middle: Tracing
Bottom: Drawing (transferred) on handmade paper
So I spent much of my Sunday working on my Raven painting. I had a grand total of 2 raven photos to work from and though I liked them, they weren’t totally what I was looking for. I needed to make some changes. Surprisingly the drawing part went very easily considering most of it came out of my head.
The first thing was to open his beak and set his head lower. I did my drawing and thought that I could work with it. So when tracing onto tracing paper (to later transfer onto the handmade paper) I slid the paper some to set his head lower on his body.
I’m liking the look of this. The nice thing about tracing my drawing is that I lose so many of the fussy lines I got going in the initial drawing. It adds a degree of simple elegance.
And so I trace this over to the handmade paper and begin. This wip is about 1 1/2 hours color work. I like what I’ve got going but it’s just not “quite” right.
I’ve pondered it and have decided it needs to be bigger. Though I like the way it filled the page in a line drawing. Once I began adding color, the bird seemed more insignificant. The “new” plan is to crop in closer on the head so I can really enjoy the detail froo-froo work with his hackles. (That’s the beard-like part on his throat.)
And so after a full day of working on it, I scrap it and will begin again with a new enlarged drawing. This was a good warm up and now I will make some color adjustments as well. Too bad I don’t have some mechanical way of doing this. Ah well . . . it’s building my drawing skills right?
Updated: This was written on Sunday. I figured out a way (with the help of Mike) of mechanically enlarging it. I will cover it in the next post.
Also Budda was just the right amount of pushy. He encouraged me to take some play breaks and occasionally a cuddle break, without demanding my full attention all of the time. So kitten got to run free the whole day.
I loved your line drawings — I can see where something is lost when the color is going on and agree that enlarging it/cropping in closer will bring back that quality. I look forward to how you are going to enlarge it mechanically. I am glad your day went uninterrupted and that Budda was a good boy.
Your cat rules. Really cool raven, keep going!
Thanks to both of you.