Painting Techniques | Animal Artist

ANDREW FORKNER

NATURAL ART

The creative process.

This page is designed to give you an insight into the picture-making process.

It shows, in a series of stages just what is involved, from initial inspiration, to the finished Pastel painting of a grey wolf.

Inspiration

This is one of a series of photos I took of the wolves at the Cotswold Wildlife Park near where I live in Oxfordshire. I was particularly inspired by the interlocking colours/shapes formed by the sleeping animal and decided to zoom in close (filling the frame) and use this as the basis for a composition.

I first produce a drawing of the animal on a scrap sheet of paper, where I can constantly adjust the sketch until I have it just the way that I want it. Then I transfer this outline to my pastel paper, by tracing from the rough drawing.

I have chosen a mid-grey (Hahnemühle Velour) paper for this picture, because that is a good base for the overall colouring of the subject, but also to provide a shadow tone within the small areas of snow that I intend to include in the composition.

You can see in this image that I have now filled in the transferred outline with some colour, applied in a fairly loose fashion, but still following the direction in which the animals fur grows.

I am using soft pastel sticks and just blocking-in rather than being too concerned with detail or finish.

The colours are approximate at this stage and do not have to be exact, as I will be adding many more layers of colour and detail, gradually refining the overall effect.

Now I have begun to refine some of the detail, working with pastels of a harder texture that allow for clearer lines, but still soft enough to allow me to work 'light over dark' where I need to. Working in this way you can achieve more depth to your depiction of fur, with the dark areas creating realistic shadows.

It is important as you work back and forth across your painting that you keep a piece of clean paper beneath your hand. This protects the painting and also prevents you from picking up pastel on your hand and then inadvertently transferring it to other areas of your drawing.

Some of these areas now have several layers of a variety of colour added and the subtle changes in the wolf's coat colouring are becoming evident.

As you can see in this next stage I have added the snow in the background. This was created using a white soft pastel, applied in varying amounts to allow the grey to show through and give the impression of shadows. It was necessary to put the snow in at this stage, because I needed to overlay it with the longer/darker hair on the wolf's back. Drawing the wolf's coat to completion and then trying to fit the snow around the individual hairs would have been impossible.

You can also see that I have started work on the back leg and on the wolf's head. Each of these areas required a slightly different approach. The head has very short hair covering it and so I used a 'stippling' approach, working in small dots of colour, rather than lines.

The back leg has a very complex arrangement of hair and so I had to work very closely with all my reference photos to get the detail correct.

Now, having almost completed the back leg and the head I have started to add more detail to the tail. The hair on the tail represents the longest hair on the animal's body and so I am using much longer strokes with the pastel, but also introducing lots of shadows between the hairs to increase the illusion of depth.

The overall colouration of the tail is a rich chestnut, but that is created by a combination of 5 or 6 colours to give a more realistic effect.

You will see that some of the dark areas on the back of the wolf have been lightened, with the addition of some lighter grey hairs over the top, to give some subtle variation and also the feeling of light shining on the coat.

I have also introduced the foreground snow and added a few flecks which are sticking to the wolf.

The final stage is one of refining the details and colours, using either harder (square profile) pastel sticks, which can be sharpened on a sandpaper block or with pastel pencils that will also produce fine lines.

The advantage of the velour paper that I use is that the fibres of the paper will hold more pastel than traditional pastel papers, so that I can build up colours and effects with multiple delicate layers of colour.

Finally, once I am satisfied that I have made all the adjustments that are necessary, the picture just requires my signature and is ready to mount and frame.

This painting, entitled 'Winter Dreams' is available as a limited edition print. Click here for details.

If you are interested in learning to use pastels or improving your techniques I can provide individual/group tuition. See Tuition and Talks for more details.