Progress is being made slowly but surely on Jonah’s Tavern, although that’s only because I’m focusing on precision and attention to detail more so than my other projects. One of the things I’ve really enjoyed doing in this piece has been the bear head mounted on the wall as it’s helped me to learn loads of different techniques to experiment with in the future.
When I was younger and just starting out with digital art, I used to love drawing animals, but more so cartoon-style dogs and cats. This normally included drawing the outline of the animal and just colouring it in; never usually paying attention to the texture of the fur or anything. Painting this bear helped me learn how to use different paint tools and opacities to create the appearance of fur I’ve never been able to do previous to this. With a fine, solid brush tool, I added some brush strokes in flicks directed away from the nose in a lighter colour than the base. After, I did the same thing just with a darker colour to create the shadows, which added depth to the fur.
For extra detail, I also tried adding some fur in a lighter colour around the edges of the lips, using a reference as a guide for this part to see how dense the fur should be around this area. I didn’t use this technique for the main body of fur as it is a darker colour than the muzzle, and any detail I added wouldn’t be seen too well (as I’ll explain in a later blog post).
When taxidermists work on their animals, they replace their eyes with glass ones. With this in mind, I didn’t feel like it was enough to just make a gradient of colour for the eyes as real glass eyes would have a shine to them, or maybe a reflection. After making amber with an orange to yellow gradient, I added some white areas and smudged them in, before blurring them.
Looking back now, I feel like I should have added some shading to the upper part of the eye, which would have been casted by the eyelid or maybe the huge shadow to the right hand side of the bear (which you can see in the full image).
I was super proud of the shine I made on the mouth and teeth! It was a very similar method to how I made the shine on the eye, as I just gradually lightened the colour around the highlighted area before feathering and blurring it. The only difference I did was with the lips, where instead of just lightening the colour I also made it gradually bluer. Using reference again for this part, I realised that the nose and the lips of bears are so dark that they give off a blue-ish light, so I tried to replicate this as much as I could. Overall, I was really pleased with how it turned out above the other parts I did.
Knowing now how to paint animals with more detail than I did previously, I would definitely use more than one layer. Normally in everything I produce, I make sure to use as many layers as possible to avoid having to start over because I changed my mind on something, or in case I ruined another part that cannot be undone by mistake. I wasn’t expecting to like what I practiced with so much, so I didn’t really expect to keep everything I did on the one layer. It’s definitely something to bear in mind in the future.
Eden Thompson - NextGen 