A pyramid of critters

This piece was quickly completed over a weekend.

 

For the stag at the top, and the pairs of deer, foxes, rabbits and badgers, I stayed with shades of browns and greys, all neutral, and varied the tones within them. I took liberties with the hedgehogs (iridescent blue/purple!) and mice (decidedly jaundiced). 

I broke away from the usual green for the few leaf vines and rendered them in burgundy and blue, inspired by team Aston Villa's colors. A rather pleasing combo, I say. 

All in, a fun piece to do, rather fewer leaves than the five kajillion that Basford is wont to draw!  

Three recent works

It's been a while since I updated this blog. Life called. I have done three more works, all from Joanna Basford's Enchanted Forest book in the past few months. 

 

This bird might be a crow, but who cares? Another exercise in color and light. I don't think I achieved the iridescence that I was getting at, like in this video.  

My next piece was of these two unicorns. I wanted them to pop, so kept the color of the leaves around them in pale sage and associated colors. The result wasn't quite what I wanted. Because I had rendered the horses in grey - one in a warm grey with teal mane and tail and the other, a cool grey with blue mane and tail - the animals weren't exactly jumping out either. 

Maybe I should have done them in stronger shades - chestnut brown and dark silver/grey.  

Their horns: I tried for a metallic look in high shine, hence the contrasting shades of dark grey and white, but it's not quite there, I think.  

For this picture, the eye gravitates more to the loud flower, for which I played with shades of orange and pink. (Fashion's hot color combo a few seasons ago!)

 

This one, I'm quite happy with. I would have just done a straight coloring in of the door, but a picture done by someone else (which appeared online) gave me the idea to try for an old, weathered look. 

I used two shades of brown, a beige and a yellow on the top and bottom edges of the door, creating a gradient of shades. Then I reckoned that the area below the door handles would also have had the green paint worn away from frequent use. 

For the metalwork on the door, I used bronze. The highlights were in white. I don't think the glass inlay in the centre of the door worked. More practice needed to achieve glass effects.  

For the door to pop out, I kept the green strong, and the rest of the walls in muted greys and creams.