Lines: Animal Portrait

Original sketch

More sketches

Some more sketches, looking at shading and
head shapes

For my animal portrait, I decided to draw my three pet mice. The white one is named Cassie, the black one that she's sitting on is Sammy, and the brown one who eats too much is Dean. I used prisma colors in this piece, obviously, even after swearing that I would never so much as look at prisma colors ever again for the rest of my life. And it was actually a lot of fun. I used some layering techniques that I had never considered before, which are especially prominent in Cas's fur. I also layered a lot on the wheel and its shading.

I think this project was successful for me because I paid attention to my technique, and it was large and complex enough to hold my interest for a long amount of time. I think five days? There are some things that I don't like about it, but overall, I think it turned out really well and is most definitely one of my better pieces this semester.

I appreciate the warm undertones that the red paper gave my mice, but they are not under a red light? I just really like the color red for prisma colors. So, since changing the technique that gives a lot of this piece its individualism, I would change the paper in the background to a brown or orange. Yellow might not have gone so well with the blue. I would also have liked to look at Dean's proportions a little more; I don't know what I can do now, but she still looks a little cartoonish to me. Of course, I might want to make not to use more unrealistic colors all over the picture in the future, so I don't have just one section that stands out as really miscolored, but I don't think the effect is too terrible here.

I really appreciated working on this drawing, and it had given me new understanding of prisma colors. Though there were things that I would change, this picture definitely has its strengths. I will post the final soon.