Second time’s a charm…
… or third. The gray stage is a good time to make adjustments to the drawing.
When you know your subject really well, it’s really easy to get fixated on imperfections. The positions of the eyes and nose were really bothering me, and if you flip through the various gray stage images, you’ll see how I keep making small adjustments until it looked right enough. I particularly like how the eyes suggest the tilt of her head.
The gray stage just used a combination of raw umber and white. In the color stage, Sorcha’s fur is made up with a transparent red oxide, ultramarine blue, and alizaron. The fur by her nose is highlighted a bit more with specks of blue and black.
The FAO Schwarz Patrick pup that Sorcha is holding was terribly tedious. First, I layered in the dark brown, mostly a combination of raw umber and transparent red oxide. Then I brushed in each fur clump in a creamier brown, each time stepping back to make sure the overall gradient matched the shape of pup. In the end, though, I think the contract between Sorcha’s super soft looking fur and Patrick’s shorter clumpy fur works really well.
Lucky for me, Sorcha’s sister, Bianca, just worked out easily.
