Last night I finished a drawing that I've been working on for a while now. On my facebook fan page Real Animal Pet Portraits I had a contest and this is the winner. Just thought it would be fun to show the drawing from start to finish.
I usually start my drawing with the very darks and the main features of my subject. Starting with the darks probably isn't always the best of ideas, but that's just what I do. :) You can also see here that I've already changed the basic sketch - I moved the lower jaw in farther.
I had a lot of trouble deciding if I was going to do the eyes green or not, but after I decided to, I was very happy! The eyes are done in prismacolor colored pencil. Sure, they look "just" green, but there are probably between 5 and 10 different colors in each eye. In this stage also I did some shading around the hairs in the cat's ears and started to do some hair on the top of his head.
Not much to say here. The cat has whisker dots, a shadow behind his left ear and stripes. You can see that I'm still working mostly with the very darks. I guess the dark hair can be faster because you can't see as much detail as you can with light hair. The shadows between the hair are the same color as the hair itself, which really cuts down on the amount of work involved. Oh, I also started on the cat's ruff. Since the ruff is made of long, soft, somewhat frizzy hair I can't get too detailed on it. Here I've rubbed some shadows on with a tissue that has been rubbed in graphite. I guess I had a lot to say here after all!
Now I've started with the lighter hair on the forehead. This hair is incredibly time consuming because it consists of layers upon layers of tiny, individual pencil strokes. It can be hard sometimes to fill up a large space with hair without making the hair in "rows" or too straight and "flat" looking.
More hair. Started on giving part of the ruff a bit of detail.
More hair, and more detail to the other side of the ruff. Also started adding the whiskers. I did this simply by "drawing" them in with my kneaded eraser.
Here (in addition do doing more hair) I've done some more shading with a tissue in the ruff. I typically don't like to use a tissue to shade or smudge a drawing because that makes it loose detail, but for something like this fluffy ruff that needs to look extremely soft and fluffy, it works really well. I had to re-draw the whiskers after all that smudging.
And here is the finished product :) I gave the cat's right eye a pretty major overhaul. It was really bothering me that it didn't have a pupil, so I actually tried putting a pupil in. If you've ever worked with colored pencil, you know how scary this was because colored pencil DOES NOT erase. Well, as it turned out, after quite a long time (probably near an hour) of layering colors and toying with the shape, placement and size of it,the attempted pupil/slit looked horrible! I ended up scraping it off with the tip of a knife. But the eye still looked weird. After studying my reference photo, I finally realized that the shape was all wrong. It was too big and not slanted up enough. So I did another crazy thing. I took my knife again and started scraping off the inside edge of the eye. It's still not perfect, but I was able to get it down to a much better size and shape. Whew. I don't know that I've ever attempted to change something so major and basic this late in a drawing, but I was really happy with the way it worked out. Also in this last stage I finished the cat's left ear. Basically, I smudged up the inside of the ear with my tissue, and then "drew" the hairs in with my kneaded eraser. The hairs look a bit stiffer than I would like them too, but I guess they're fine. I did a lot of tiny adjustments in this stage too...there was a lot of sitting down, drawing a few hairs, and then standing back from the drawing to see if I missed anything. To finish the drawing, I drew in the whiskers coming off the left side of the drawing, and signed it. ALL DONE! :)
Here is the original photo and a few close-ups of the eyes and face:
Wow, I never thought about how hard it would be to keep from doing the hair in rows. It's a very interesting story to read the steps you took from start to finish.
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