Wednesday 22 August 2018

22/08: Practice Piece - Lion in Pastel on Fisher 400 sanded paper

Its a long time since I worked on Fisher 400 - I used to love it but am struggling this time.  I think its probably nothing to do with the paper, more that I've lost a bit of confidence as I'm not getting enough practice these days ...

So I'm treating this as a practice piece.   I will draw more animals from photos taken in Kenya earlier this year and hopefully will soon get back up to speed.

My camera insists on turning the paper white and the lion rather red.   I've tried David's camera and got slightly better results but still had to adjust the image a lot to get it close to 'proper' colours.     I do tend to wait will early evening to take the photos so its probably tied up with the poor light.

Anyway, enough ramblings. .... 

see what I mean about strange hues ... Fisher 400 is sandpaper - sort of yellowy but the camera tries to turn it white or grey.


I've adjusted this but it still not true to life


Another adjusted one - pretty poor really .... the lion isn't finished but I need to start something different tomorrow.    Although Fisher 400 doesn't really need fixative I've sprayed this lightly which will stop me fiddling with it till the fixative dries


I've agreed to portray a dog for a returning client.   I'm not really taking on commissions at the moment but this client provided such wonderful ref. photos for her horse portrait that I assumed the dog photos would be equally good ... they weren't!

Sadly the dog has recently passed away and all ref. photos were taken on a mobile phone and too small for me to work from.    However, the client has now found one photo that is a better size so I'm able to zoom in and get enough detail.     So I need to make a start before we set off on our travels again next week.   

I'll spend a couple of afternoons on it then I'll have to clean the pastel dust from my room (and any other place I trail it) before our house-sitter arrives.

6 comments:

  1. Keto Lady here.

    You know how much I like lions and am so excited to see you painting one. It's coming along so well too. Hate you have to stop and work on the commission.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very unusual picture of a lion. I like it. I think you've done a great job.

    Where are you off to now?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks Jan ... and yes, you have shown up as Jan so I can now delete all the 'anonymous' comments without worry! I'll get back to the lion when we're back from Fuerte, or maybe even start another - after all I have thousands of ref photos! Thanks for commenting.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Jan. We've been to India and Kenya this year (with trips to our home on Fuerteventura in between) so I've had very little time to keep up with Blogs or artwork.

    I'm not really complaining as we've had some lovely experiences and have booked to go back to Kenya next June.

    David has itchy feet and it seems since he turned 70 he is determined to pack in lots of travel experiences whilst we're still fit enough. We're off to Fuerte for 6 weeks from Monday and then Gibraltar in October .... there's no stopping this man!

    Thanks for commenting on the lion. He hasn't turned out quite as planned but at least he's got me back at the drawing board. Between us we took around 8000 photos in Kenya and I've whittled those down to a couple of hundred. Lots of reference pics to choose from!

    ReplyDelete
  5. love Fisher 400, but so much money for a sheet of it lol

    great job with the texture of the lions fur :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks Jennifer. I won a batch of this paper. Don't know if Tim Fisher still does it but he used to have a monthly caption competition (put a title to his dog's activities). The paper was curled when it arrived so I put it away to flatten it and just stumbled across it the other day. Shame to waste it!

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for visiting my Blog. Let me know what you think :-)

I have disabled the Captcha requirement at the request of followers who find it irritating when posting comments. However to stop the subsequent flood of spam posts I can no longer accept comments from Anonymous sources.
Apologies if this is a problem
Thank you
Sue
x