I know what I said last time, "I don't want to get into doing just animal portraits"- but this was a sort of birthday gift for a friend. So let's let this one go.
It was designed to be something small and cute, but equally illustrative, aiming for a graphical instead of realistic style, and trying to make the best of recent developments with coloured pencil. It's been a long journey but I think I'm somewhere (good) with them now.
I also wanted to finally get a set of cat ears right and this is...about as close as I've come so far.
I picked out the pose and angle for the composition purposes as I intended to give away the original- so I didn't want something that needed an intense amount of cropping. It's okay to be able to edit something if no-one is likely to see the original, or if you're salvaging a "lost" piece, but when it comes to an original they will see it needs to be perfect.
Composition has never been a particularly strong point for me and I had my doubts about squaring off this piece, but, I think, for the most part, it has certainly worked out as intended.I knew I was going to push for an illustration type of style...but other than that? I had no idea. I was just really hoping the piece would explain itself in time. Eventually it did and I knew that coloured pencil was the best choice for it.
Though watercolour was also on the list and it very well could've gone either way.
That said, I did see a pretty awesome rabbit illustration the other day that I believe was done in ink. That was a pretty big influence for this piece and how I wanted it to be.
As always the anatomy, and the cropping, were big parts of this piece, which made it quite an interesting choice in terms of subject matter. I'm always looking to expand with new ideas or styles and a few of these spontaneous animal portraits seem to be doing the job nicely. (Though I don't want to fall into doing just animal portraits.)
But that is a story for another day... (read more)