Tigerific

 

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I've had several people ask for a tutorial about painting animals. This is something I'm excited to get started with, but I'm wondering if you have any specific questions or things you'd like to know. Any input would really help, and I thank you in advance!

Lion King

 

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When I was coming up with a title for this, the words lion and king kept coming up in my head, I think because this guy is so regal looking. When I finally remembered it was also the name of a famous movie (duh), I thought, oh I can't use that, it's taken. But that's not a thing! Because if every title had to be unique, we would have run out a long time ago. This is unfortunately a real problem with domain names, which is something my husband and I were trying to brainstorm recently. How are we going to fix that problem?!

Sad Sack

 

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I found this adorable racoon on Pixabay. The background in the original reference was pretty boring, so I played around with alternatives on my ipad and settled on this one - I would call it a tomato red. And that's why he's sad - he didn't find any tomatoes.

Jaunty Giraffe

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This one was incredibly hard, but so satisfying. The giraffe head is mostly in shadow, so the colors are mostly gray and dark(ish). As I mixed my colors I had to keep reminding myself of that, even though I wanted so badly to add in some bright colors. In the reference photo there are a bunch of busy trees behind him, so I decided to make up a very light background for contrast. As I was laying it down with the palette knife I realized I really liked the blue showing along the edges so I stopped myself at this point and called it done.

Chillin' Cheetah

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This cheetah has just the right number of spots. Any more and I would have gotten sick of painting them. Ha.

Many thanks to Paul Kratter for lending me the reference for this painting. Hope you have a great time on your next trip to Africa!

Wolfie

 

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I took a second picture next to a window to show the texture, especially on the background.

I realized after a few of these that I keep changing the background to blue. They are different shades of blue at least, but still, blue. So I asked myself why, and I think it's because when the animal is a warm color, especially leaning towards orange, blue is a nice complement. I didn't really think that through logically until afterwards - I just used the color that felt right.