It's been a while, mostly spent waiting for the painting to actually dry, but the ocelot painting is now finished!
So here's a bit of a refresher as to where the painting got to last time:
I had roughed out the greyscale underpainting ready to begin glazing in the colour.
I started off putting the yellows in the ocelot fur along with bluer tones in the white furs. This gave the image a temporary strange green-tint to it.
Then I began putting the warmer brown tones into the fur and the pinks into the nose and ears. And, generally, just building up the colour intensity on the painting. At this point the colour started to look very flat so I worked a white fur layer back into the image and the texture of the nose.
I tinted this with thin glazes of brown and repeated the process. Finally I added some bluey shadows to the whiskers and added some dark shades to the ocelot and background (the latter is what took so long to dry).
Here's the final outcome albeit with still a little glare that I've mostly edited out as it's so hard to photograph a shiny dark painting. I'm pretty happy with how the glazing of the colour went. The painting is in a chiaroscuro style - I've been re-learning my art terms recently, can you tell? ;) - this is where a strong contrast between light and dark is used to convey a more dramatic image. It was particularly used in the Baroque art period by the likes of Caravaggio and Rembrandt, who's artwork I particularly liked.
I would have liked my mark-making to be better than it was but was hampered somewhat by my photographic reference which was unfortunately a little blurred and obscured. I also need to get a couple of new brushes as my fine ones are wearing thin which makes fine details harder to put in. But the main concern I had with painting this way with colour glazes is that I wouldn't be able to build up enough depth of tone and colour and I think it turned out very well on that front.
I hope you like it.
Mistletoe is an odd plant. It's evergreen and grows in the crowns of broad-leaved
trees such as apple, lime, hawthorn, and poplar. The plant is actually
hemiparasitic on the trees it grows on and uses roots called haustorium
to both attach itself to trees and to draw nutrients and water from
them. The native mistletoe to the UK is Viscum album - it has
rounded simple spatula-like leaves and spherical translucent white
berries. The berries have sticky juice that was used to make a glue in
the past to catch birds.
Mistletoe is a plant very much associated with this chilly time of
year along with holly and ivy. It's often used in Christmas decorations
and has been important in past European customs, legends, and religious
ceremonies. Kissing under the mistletoe is a long-running tradition, the
first evidence of which comes from England back in the 16th Century. In
pre-Christian Europe mistletoe was seen as as a symbol of divine male
essence and was associated with romance, fertility and vitality and used
in ancient Celtic rituals. In fact mistletoe is still a part of modern
day druid ceremonies.
Speaking of which, I headed out
for a walk with friends just a couple of days before the winter solstice
to visit the Coldrum long barrow - a Neolithic tomb. By chance we
stumbled upon a druid ceremony taking place. Solstice observances
involve the celebration of the end of the darkening days as from this
point the days begin to lengthen towards the summer. As part of their
ceremony they took cuttings from mistletoe. They offered some to us
telling us that the mistletoe had yet to touch the ground and to plant
it and make a wish for the new year.
And with that in mind:
Happy New Year!
