'Circus Parade' Work In Progress

For the last six days I have been working intensely on this large 90 x 50cm watercolour painting. It might not be a mural but it's large enough for me!

Fuzzy photo time! Still using the drafting I was given when I was a school boy.

You can see I returned to the usual sepia tonal under-painting to maintain a warm hue throughout the image. I decided if all the action is inside a tent lit by gas lamps, without natural light, then all the shadows are going to be warm.

Fuzzy / wonky photo! Note the reflected warm light on the underside of the elephants.

Once the under-painting was completed, I blocked in all the local colour for every single character and object. In the process of 'blocking-in', I suddenly realised I needed to roughly outline most of the audience, using sepia, in order to create a mass of shapes that would convince the viewer they were looking at a group of seated animals. This took a  l  o  n  g  time, not surprisingly, but as I introduced local colour, when I returned to 'blocking-in', the effect was as intended and so worth the effort.

Final fuzzy photo! The current state of the painting, waiting in my studio for Monday morning.

Local colour down, I started to really render each individual character in the parade as best I could, starting from the left and moving across. I'm still in that tight rendering process now, but I'm happy with my progress. At this rate, I should be finished late next week - unless I run away to the circus.