BUSY, BUSY, BUSY

I’m uploading as much content as I can to my Patreon channel. At the moment it’s 1 video for each tier every week! That’s a lot of content 😀

This weekend we have…

> How to draw a black and white cat in pastels..
AND
> How to paint a Pheasant in acrylics. 

Drawing black and white fur can be challenging. White fur was one of the more difficult elements I found when new to pastels. White fur is very reflective so it is never truly white. The base layers are crucial in building that initial depth for when the details are added. Working in subtle layers to build up the softness in that fur. Cat fur is usually softer looking that dog fur so we want to make sure we capture that in our artwork. 

Where the black and white fur meet needs to be crisp and no ‘muddy areas’ develop where the darker pastel pigment has been dragged into the lighter areas. I will speak about this throughout this tutorial and how to avoid that can be applied to any other portrait where the same could occur. Leopard spots, Tiger stripes for instance. 

Painting a Pheasant was one of the hardest wildlife subjects I have done to date. Our main aim when capturing these birds is to replicate the iridescent feathers and their beautiful colours. These will be the main areas I focus on for this tutorial along with the contrast – a key element of any artwork but especially so here. The feathers only look that way because I have bright colour overlapping or next to highly contrasted areas. This makes those feathers stand out. I also wanted to capture the movement in this painting. The bird is walking towards the camera so the light source is really something to get right. I used an airbrush for the background but as this is just a soft effect the standard brushwork approach would also give you a very similar look.

Both of these tutorials, given their complexity will be broken up into two parts. For both tutorials, part 1 will focus on the heads and then part 2 will tackle the bodies. I decided to break these up for a couple of reasons.. The first that these tutorials are covering a lot. Every step, like all of my tutorials BUT the body of the cat, given that the fur is longer and the white fur overlaps in many places will require a slightly different technique so I wanted that to feature in a tutorial on its own. The Pheasant face has a lot of detail to add so this on it’s own is a 2 hour tutorial because painting beak texture, the tiny feathers on the face and neck can’t be rushed. Then the body of the Pheasant, the part where capturing that iridescent look is crucial I wanted to feature in a separate tutorial. 

If you’re interested in these slower Patreon tutorials click here 🙂