More Wildlife Drawings

Still going through photos taken throughout the years for incentive and as reference material.  These are from outside living room window here in Florida.

BJD 2B pencil

Wildlife Drawings

Going back to 2011 and 2012 when we lived in WV, I decided to draw from some of my photos taken while living out away from towns or subdivisions.  The one thing we miss is all the wildlife we enjoyed watching day to day.  

Not feeling like messing with color, I chose to work all of these with the 2B pencil brush tool.

Mushrooms and Prayer Plant

All using Ipad to draw on, these are my latest drawings.

With the mushrooms, I wanted to use a different technique than I normally do, which is using the smudge tool to blend.  Instead I chose to use the eraser tool set with the same brush tool as I'm using to lay down color.  

The other thing I've been concentrating on are values so my drawings are done in black and white.  Then if I want to add color, I can do so using the layer blending color mode.  The concept came to me from Steven Reddy's method where he paints using ink for his values first and then goes over with watercolor.

 

With the prayer plant, I used the 2B pencil brush tool but used the Smudge tool and Gouache brush tool for blending.

The one major plus using the Ipad is being able to work on layers.  If I'm working along and really like the progress so far, I'll add another layer for additions in case I'm not happy with the new results needing to back-track.  I can just delete the layer and start again.

I also like using layers for different components and also for darks and lights.

In this example, I wasn't quite happy with the leaf markings.......some were not dark enough for my liking whereas the others were fine.  So, I duplicated the layer with the leaf markings, erased the ones I didn't want darker, set on multiply to blend with the initial layer and turned down the opacity until I was happy with the values.  My other option would have been selecting only those marks I needed darker and using Hue/Saturation/Brightness, I could have gone darker.  I prefer using the duplicate layer method when there are several areas scattered that I want to adjust.

After completed in black and white, I added two layers each set at the Color Blend Mode.  When I lay down color, it will only color areas from layers below that is black.