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robertsloan2 — Fatalis At Pond
Published: 2006-12-29 16:31:13 +0000 UTC; Views: 1754; Favourites: 27; Downloads: 22
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Description
9" x 6" Pelikan gouache on Crescent illustration board.A female Smilodon fatalis, slightly pregnant, looks out over a forest pond from a flat dark sedimentary rock, content with herself and her world. ~kitten42 subtitled this painting "This is the spot." She has tigerlike markings because no one knows what their coloration was, and I liked how that looked. I will vary the markings and colors every time I do extinct cats to make that point. Her facial markings are a little different with elements of puma and cheetah as well, but serve the purpose of facial recognition and exaggerating expression that most feline facial markings do. I kept the stark black-white contrasts on ears and tail-tip for the same reasons big cats often have them -- recognition at a distance while stalking and recognizing expression.
Gouache has a matte texture that softens paintings, it allows light over dark (as in her whiskers), and when given a coat of gloss varnish (Krylon clear gloss) it pops out with richer, more vibrant colors and stronger contrasts. It's a great illustration medium -- and this time I finally did something resembling an actual illustration!
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Comments: 40
Thank you! I followed the link in your signature and took a good long look at your gallery. My favorites were both versions of Bridge of Finea, slightly favoring the first one where the bridge was closer to the middle ground, but both were grand. You have a wide variety of subjects!
If you want critique, I'd be happy to help. If not, I just have to say that your work is growing in excellence. I could not quite tell from the gallery numbers which pieces were newer or older, but you've got a very large body of work there and sometimes I can see leaps of skill very similar to the ones I make. At least in my DeviantART gallery it's easy for me to work backward and see which older pieces are still that good and which ones, if I did them now, I'd improve on.
One of mine that frustrates me is Cascade II -- the final version of it. For once I did create a very realistic landscape entirely from imagination. The place does not exist. But I had intended to create an untouched natural landscape and what I did was a good realistic rendering of an artificial small waterfall that someone might put up on his land just to make it pretty -- maybe at the point a small creek goes down a slope, or if the natural one had been structurally unstable. The rocks look chosen and cemented together to guide the water.
I don't have any acrylic paintings posted here at all, because I haven't done any in the past few years. I did get all the supplies and have been meaning to do some, but it was a matter of weather, health, living situations and so on -- it's much more portable using watercolor and colored pencils. So oils and acrylics have been stored nicely and set aside till I wound up in a good stable living situation where I'd have room to spread out and set up the palette and easel and paraphernalia.
Happily, this is going to be soon, around this summer. ~kitten42 planted a garden and is still in the process of planting everything she bought, today some perennials are scheduled to go into the ground. She bought a house last summer, about a month before I first came down. I had surgery last fall. We didn't get any gardening in during the fall, though had the previous owners' nice rosebush blooming to welcome me here.
Aside from gardening providing good subjects for floral paintings, the yard is spacious and comfortable with good outdoor furniture. Acrylics are not as difficult as oils for odor, but they still take up a lot of space and I'd need to set up the table easel somewhere. My room's a bit crowded, the living room a bit full of toddlers and other parts of the house full of whatever that room's intended for. So come summer, it'll be warm outside and I'll start bringing out canvases and canvas boards to get more into painting.
Right now anything I could do in my lap on a drawing board is what's up. Later on, I may expand to many different media I used to do well and start posting other tutorials. I had a technique with acrylics that was a close emulation of oil painting, it involved very gradual mixing and shading plus using lots of acrylic gloss medium to make layered glazes a big part of how I did that shading. I never had formulas for mixing. I'd put a great wad of paint out on the palette and start adding a little of this and that either with the palette knife or the narrow flat brush, stir a little but not too much, and swipe it through some other mixture to tone it.
On this painting, Fatalis at Pond I did pretty much the same thing with the gouache -- same mixing technique. Almost all of the colors have a slight mixture of all the rest of the colors toning them back and forth, except the shading on the animal which was its own continuous stripe of mixed areas. My palette always looks like it's covered with multicolored shaded worms crawling here and there as the last mixture gets lightened or darkened or browned or blued a little and used somewhere else. I shaded the greens down with the earth tones. I lightened the yellow for the fallen leaves and muted it with the earth tones. I reddened the whole mess to get the purply-red sandstone block she's laying on.
Gouache of course, has no transparency at all, so I couldn't do my glazing technique and had to rely on minute changes of value and tint to get any depth and shading at all. When I've got acrylics, usually the shading does get a little bit smoother. In the original, I gave the whole thing a thick coat of spray acrylic varnish for a glossy finish, and that helped a lot on any gouache painting -- makes the colors pop right out into brilliance.
I love those bridge scenes you did with their reflections and textures. Both of them are so striking and have such depth.
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WOW.That's some reply.
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Thank you! I enjoyed your gallery so much. I hope you get plenty of commissions -- and the bridge pieces still hang in my memory so clear, I wish I could do something like that. (Eh, someday I'll actually dare try it, no chance it'll happen before then! lol)
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Thank you! It continues to surprise me, since I thought the colors were very naturalistic and muted. I think it's the combination, since no tiger coloration is actually muted. Once I had the background in, she just popped!
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Very Nice Robert. The colours are so Sharp. I'm debating doing a sabertooth with a lion's tawny biege colouration, in pencil.
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That would be so incredibly gorgeous. I can't wait to see it. Please, please do that one, it'll be wonderful! I'm glad you're not abandoning your pencil style. My lynx gives me a thrill every time I go into the living room.
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I spent two hours on it last night Robert.
A smilodon Fatalis sitting beside it's kill a Bison Latifrons. I'll work on it some more this evening.
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Ooooh you have me so hooked on this one. I can see this is a year I get two Houlys. It's irresistible by concept. By its kill -- that's something I haven't tried with any of my big cats, so I'm looking forward to seeing how you do this!
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Haha .. Two Houly's huh ? You haven't even seen the Smilodon yet Robert, but I did manage to obsess myself and finish it this weekend. I just need to sign it and reseal it once more, then I'll get it scanned and uploaded tomorrow.
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Oooh purr!
Actually I know it's you and graphite. You and a cat in graphite. Lynx on my wall. Smilodon in my dreams and in my book. Did I mention that I wrote an entire fantasy novel with two Pleistocene shamans with Smilodon fatalis totems battling an evil tribe of cannibals somewhere around what will one day be LA? Smilodon is special to me, always has been. I can't wait to see it and I am already budgeting for it unless it goes up into the price range for your larger oils.
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Sounds like an exciting Story Robert. I seem to remember you mentioning something about it to me before, but nothing in depth.
My drawing's up for you to take a look at. Let me know if you're interested and I shant put a price on it, but I will give you both the painting and drawing for a good deal.
Remember as well that I may do more prehistoric art during the year so who knows ... the next one may be even better.
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I went and favorited and wrote you a long comment on it. He's beautiful! Better than I imagined, and I have a pretty vivid imagination. You could not go wrong drawing the star of my book, but when I saw the bison as well and what you did with him -- WOW!
I may have to change the description in my book and give short manes to them because he's so RIGHT that way. I love him. Even more definite than I was unseen. Now you might tempt me again later on with other prehistorica, I don't doubt it, but this one is absolutely incredible -- I loved the weird slightly abstract background that shoves both animals forward while setting the stage so darkly dramatic! The black ridge hangs in my head, it's sunset and that great bison died and that great cat is watching something he doesn't fear with curious interest. I almost get the impression he's watching his pride approach rather than some rival, he doesn't look so much aggressive as proud and satisfied.
This is something subtle you do: you draw happy cats! Strong healthy happy cats in their prime. It's the second time you've done one and he looks like he's king of the world, he's got that feline "I rule" look to him -- and he's twisting in one of those wonderful motions only a cat can manage. He doesn't look posed. He looks real, and yet he's not roaring into the viewer's face the way many Smilodon or tiger drawings do. He's in his world having just had the day of his life, sitting on the family feast, maned and magnificent. With just a hint of cub-spots like he's young and strong with his whole life ahead of him.
The grass is spooky with many very dark little negative spaces around it, like the light is fading. Without color you set this in the evening with dramatic backlit clouds rendered simply and that spooky black ridge. Life's good in Smilodon's world, even the bison died well. The bison's face has character, strong character. You bring these creatures to life so well that I'm going to have to write another Pleistocene novel!
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Thanks Robert. I thought of that as I was drawing him ... The fat thing. haha and I didn't want to do another roaring Smilodon. They're a dime a dozen. Not to say that I never will, but I wanted it to look more like a day in the life of one. I considered having the buffalo opened up but didn't really want it to look gory so I left most of it in shadow so that the viewer knew that it was dead, but didn't have to see the bloody details. I also though about showing a more battle worn lion with cuts from the encounter and maybe a chipped tooth and such ... but the normalcy won out in the end.
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You do this with your eagles and falcons too, predators in their prime and their moment of triumph. There's a powerful optimism in all of your natural drawings and paintings. It's something I love in your work, they're the pieces that the birds and creatures would themselves like to see if they understood what a portrait was. The buffalo looked awesome too, he has so much character!
I could see the older, battle-worn lion with cuts from the encounter and a chipped tooth too, that'd just be a different drawing. I love this one though. It's incredible and has to be in my room for inspiration.
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Yeah I could do the battle worn one some day. I'll let you know what the art store had for frames next week. Maybe I'll find one for this drawing.
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That would be so great! I'd love to see it, even if I'm in love with The Kill.
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I may attempt it some day.
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I hope so! I'm looking forward to any and all prehistoric creatures you do. Or animals and birds.
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Tis lovely! I really like it! The colors are so bright!
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Thank you! I'm never sure if it's the colors that do it or if it's the way they shaded and the neutral colors that make the bright tiger-shading and green vegetation pop out, but they do. Once I varnished the original it took my breath away, but I wasn't sure if that'd carry through to the scan. Obviously it did!
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Thank you! She looks so happy. Everyone in the house commented on her good mood -- everyone in my house is so used to Ari that it's easy to read whiskers and ears for mood.
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Yes, she does look quite happy and content surveying her kingdom.
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I need to paint and draw other varieties of big stabbing cats. I've been engrossed in this wonderful book, Big Cats and their Fossil Relatives, and some of them were strange and glorious. Giant cheetahs in North America, cheetahs the size of lions -- with a much longer stride and the same proportions as today's cheetahs. Three or four other major stabbing cat lineages, all subtly different, one with jowls sort of coming down to cushion the stabbing teeth -- Smilodon hasn't got that. There's great art in the book, but also good technical drawings of the skulls and musculature. If I work up from the anatomy drawings it's not copyright violation, it's the same sort of reconstruction the other artists of the color plates did. Especially if I change the pose and draw the poses from Ari.
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Purr thank you! Wow, everyone loves the colors on this piece. I'm going to have to do more gouache paintings!
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Wow...that looks fantastic! Such vivid colors! I wish I could say something more detailed, but it's great.
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Thank you! I love what varnish does to gouache. It wasn't that vivid before the varnishing, but that just makes it pop out so much!
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Hooray for gouche! My 7 year old granddaughter has discovered dA while sitting on my lap browsing and when she saw this painting she was delighted and said she just "loves the color"!
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Wow, neat! Yeah, she is a bright cat! I liked the way I got the background stuff all muted though, to make her pop out better. Everything back there is mixed colors, usually with three maybe four elements to the mix. I have blues and greens and purples and browns in the mix on the tree bark, all laid on drybrushed over pure black. I love doing light over dark in gouache! It makes shading so easy!
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Thank you! In rooting through my illustration boards, I found a sketch of a dragon's head that looks interesting, so I might try developing that in gouache. I may cut it down from 15 x 20" though since that will not fit in my scanner by any stretch of the imagination. I'm thinking of putting in lots of surf and spray over dark rocks, and letting the dragon's body emerge from the water instead of trying to pose him so that every part is visible. Need to work on the composition for that dragon, but if I get the sketch down it'll be fun to paint.
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This sounds totally cool too
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Purr... I'm going to have so much fun with it...
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