Cheetah Chase (Past The Finish Line)

I recently finished two paintings, here's the first.

Cheetah Chase

Watercolour & Gouache

24 x 31cm

I had a right old time trying to get just the right colour in the stonework, I think I painted the column about 4 times. I have always struggled with lighter values in watercolour because there is so little room for manoeuvre when you use the white of the paper to act as your pastel white. Darker values are much easier as you can keep applying lots of layers until you get it right but lighter values are often a one hit wonder.

Overall I am pleased with the result, the cheetah has some nice reflected light on his chest (not that you can see it at this jpeg quality) and the dust cloud spurting from his hind leg was very enjoyable to paint. I'm also satisfied with the amount of characters and their facial details I managed to fit in such a small painting.

Next post... the other painting, brace yourselves!

And Now For Something Completely Different...

Last year I had the pleasure of working for Facility Management World Magazine. The brief was to create an illustration made up of 13 reasons to look forward to 2013 if you work in the facilities sector such as, award winning developments, the momentum of the Olympics and renewable energies. Each reason had to be illustrated and then group together on a (nearly) isometric platform. I had a lot of fun with a pencil working out how to group everything together into a coherent composition and by the time I had a suitable drawing the Art Director decided he wanted it to go on the cover. Smiles all around and then the thought, I hope I can pull this off!  

I powered up Adobe Illustrator on my laptop and got to work tracing out the platform, painstakingly trying to keep the perspective tight. After that it was into Photoshop to add colour on separate layers so I could adjust the colour schemes easily. I ended up with orange (above) and green (below, just in case you're colourblind).

Next came the figures which I sketched out in pencil then finished off in Photoshop and then arranged with the appropriately coloured shadows in the illustration. In the end I had four versions to show the magazine, orange, green, orange with sparkly bulbs on '2013' and green with (you guessed it) sparkly bulbs on '2013'.

In the end FM World went with the orange illustration with bulbs on and I think they made 2013 black. I now know if I get asked to do something similar again I won't have any problems.