I'm still learning by doing, and for this drawing, also from Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia coloring book, I made it an exercise in rendering gold. I have no idea whether those striped pieces of cloth one sees on Egyptian mummies and royalty are actually fabric, but this Anubis - the Egyptian god of mummification and the afterlife - seemed to wear those striped pieces of fabric as well as what could be armor, so I went with gold for what I thought was the hardware part of his head gear.
The gold was rendered with a few yellows, a coup le shades of brown and white to create the illusion of gold. I didn't use the gold color from my Prismacolor 150 pencil set at all.
Anubis is pictured here with objects typically associated with him - the crook (lower right, in blue and gold), the flail (in deep red, to the upper right) and the ankh (traditionally in gold, but rendered in silver here, just behind Anubis' head). The other objects in the picture are also deeply connected to Egypt - the scarab beetle (on Anubis' sleeve, which was too small for me to color its iridescence effectively), the pyramids and ancient columns, together with a scattering of precious jewels and an earthen pot.
It was on a whim that I also rendered the shadows cast by these objects on Anubis, since they appear to be floating above him. Rendered in deep grey, they turned out quite nicely. I realise greys work nicely for shadows or to deepen the shade of any color, and that I seldom have to use black.
The nerd in me went to read up about Anubis, in search of extra information that might aid me in my decisions on color. He is the god who oversees the souls of the departed into the afterlife, and is typically depicted as a black wolf.
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