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.
So this is the first time I've attempted a grisaille painting method on a wildlife painting. I'm currently working on the tonal greyscale painting and then I'm going to glaze in the colour later. Here are the first three stages:
In the first stage I use diluted paint to sketch out the ocelot on the canvas along with a quick wash of the background.
Once this was dry I roughed out the base tones of the ocelot along with the markings. This stage actually took forever to dry so in future I'm thinking of adding a little liquin to the paint I'm using. Liquin is a thin medium which is added to paint for glazing but which also speeds up the drying time of paint.
This is where the painting is at following the second layer of paint. The aim at this stage was to make sure the background is dark and that the base tones, shapes, and markings of the ocelot are done to where details can then be worked in. Generally this will mean the lightest highlights and darks will not yet be present and the tones themselves are a couple of shades darker so I can put in the lighter fur details later.
