A phoenix rises ... from flowers

We have all read about the mythical phoenix, which when it dies, resurrects itself from a funeral pyre of its own making, so that it rises from its own ashes, as it were. Bizarre though this sounds, phoenixes are associated with rebirth, everlasting life, starting over.

In Chinese cultures, phoenixes are used to depict brides. Grooms are represented by dragons. So the coming together of two - it is assumed, majestic - mythical creatures heralds a good union.

In Chinese cuisine, chicken claws (braised or prepared in whatever way) are euphemistically referred to as "phoenix claws". No amount of sugar coating is going to make me like eating the stuff. The scaliness of the chicken claws put me off.

Anyhow, the next pic I colored in was from my Kerby Rosanes Mythomorphia book - one of a phoenix rising, not from ashes, but from a bush of what looks to be hibiscus flowers.

I went with a red/orange/yellow palette for the bird, the wing tips of which Rosanes rendered to look like flames. His twist to the myth comes in the flowers.

My interpretation here is that the phoenix is resurrecting itself by drawing on the life force (that is, the colors) of the plants, instead of a bonfire, hence the greyness of the flowers nearest the bird. I used brighter pinks and greens in the plants at the foot of the page.

A mermaid

The mermaid from Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia book, you're up next.

I didn't want to overthink things in picking the colors for this drawing. I went with apple green for her lower body and brilliant yellow/orange for her fins.

Should I make her a blonde? No, this would be a brunette, with hair so glossy that the highlights are pale, pale pink. An unlikely combo, perhaps? It doesn't look wrong though! She looks like she just stepped out of a shampoo commercial.

I haven't done too much in skin tones, since most of Rosanes' drawings are of other-worldly beings and therefore not in human skin tones. I laid down some seashell beige or some such for her arms and back, but found this mermaid too white, so I deepened the skin tone with sepia, especially in the shadows.

The other critters on the page were quickly done... while under the influence of a bunch of flu medications. Haha.
  

Back to Egypt

The focus returns to Egypt for my next piece, following the one I did last October on Anubis, also from my Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia book.

One can't get more Egyptian than the Sphinx, the mythological creature often depicted as guarding pyramids and pharaohs' tombs. This animal has variously been depicted as male or female, but often with the body of a lion, a human head and the wings of a bird.

With this drawing, I worked on her headgear, arm band and cuff first, using bronze, pale yellow and a deep brown to give a bronze/copper finish. It was another exercise in rendering the high-contrast finish typical of metal. I find myself getting more confident with this, having done gold and silver in previous works.

I knew early on that tawny browns would dominate this picture, given that it would be a lion's body,  and it being a desert setting and all. I was therefore not too sure about making the blanket on her body brown as well; to take the monotone out of this, I gave the hem a pop of color with one of my favorite jewel-color combos - scarlet, bright blue and teal, and picked up this trio of colors also for the tassels. I was fairly pleased with it when done.

With no strong push one way or other on the color of the wings, I picked a stronger brown. It was only after the wings were done that I felt that this whole thing was becoming too brown - which is far from one of my favorite colors.

Then again, maybe it isn't "too brown". I'd rather a picture be monotone than one with colors that sock you between the eye. I see some online coloring works that are totally raw in color. In my Sec 4 art teacher's view, that's anathema. No color in nature is like that - straight from your tube of paint, she would say. (RIP, Mrs Woon.)

The Sphinx done, I took the chance to play around with color in the other objects in the background. I went with warm grey (70%) for the columns, grading it to violet for the parts facing the sun. The pyramids were in cool grey (50%) and deco peach. I was aiming for the colors one might "see" in the golden hour of day, amid the brown-ness.

Out of playfulness, I made the cat blue and the two birds a combo of rust red and pink. With all the browns in play, there was some sort of palette there, I guess!

The sun to the far right presented a chance to lay down rich layers of vermillion, Spanish orange and pale yellow. Carmine red was added to the rim for depth.

The sky: The parts nearest the sun were a lavender, graduating to a lilac, then light cerulean and then cerulean furthest from the sun. I used a tissue paper to smooth out the gradations and obscure the pencil lines.

Right half of the picture

The left half, close-up. 

And now... a fire dragon

After doing the water dragon (see here), I attempted a more conventional kind of giant lizard - the fire-breathing kind, also from Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia book.

These two dragons are on facing pages in the book, likely meant by Rosanes to be tackled together. I did so because it was an exercise in rendering water, and then fire. Two very basic elements in nature.

Bottomline: I'm not good in doing backgrounds. 
This one, like some of my other works, is a disappointment. 

There would be a lot of yellows, oranges and reds for the flames in this picture, so I went with blue for the dragon for a nice complementary color scheme, although I had my doubts that fire-breathing dragons would be blue. (But since dragons are mythical, who's to say, right?) 

I turned to the scumbling technique for the dragon's skin, using a fairly light touch and various shades of blue, going with a lighter shade where the scales catch the light. (See here for useful pencil techniques.) 

To do the fire, I used a similar technique, going with pale yellows generally in the centre of each flame, where it would be white hot, and grading to increasingly darker oranges towards the edges. Tuscan red went into the recessed "folds" of each plume of fire. 

As with the water dragon, whose fore limbs are towers of water, there is no real clear line where the dragon's scales end and tongues of fire begin here - or at least, that's how I see it. I checked other color pencil enthusiasts' work on this dragon online, and saw that most of them had colored the two large plumes of fire by the side of the dragon in the color of the dragon's skin. The way I did it, however, depicts the flames as part of the dragon itself. This dragon is the fire!

No matter, I suppose. This work is continuing to draw "likes" in my Instagram feed. 

After I was done with the reptile, I moved on to the rocky outcrop, using three shades of French grey for lit and shadowed areas. The emerald comb and card were done quickly, without fuss.

... and then, I should have stopped right there and called this piece DONE, and left the background white, like with the water dragon. 

As has so often happened when I am faced with a large expanse of background after having worked on the subject, I get impatient to be done. 

I couldn't even decide for a number of days what kind of sky I wanted, and sort of decided on a sunset palette, glowing peach around the dragon, and grading to pink and then lavender. And that's what didn't turn out so well! I tried the scumbling method so that the gradations wouldn't show, but it didn't work so well, despite using my blender pencil and a piece of tissue paper to smooth out the pencil marks in the bits when i got impatient. 

I am measuring myself from the benchmark set by Matthew Vaughn (@manlycoloring on Instagram). This is definitely something I need to work on. 

  

A water dragon

I'm on year-end vacation now, so I'll have more time for this!

Today, I completed this picture of a water dragon from Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia coloring book.

I picked purple, my favourite color, for the critter, but the challenge for this piece lay in rendering the water - how to depict transparency. I'm not too satisfied with this one. 

I used my Prismacolor powder blue and pale sage as the base color and then used a deeper blue and deeper green for the darker areas, and white and pale yellow for the parts where light is shooting through the crest of the wave.

A disappointing result

Finished coloring in Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia ghoul yesterday, a month and then some after Halloween, and I don't like what I see.

The blood moon and the glow it would have thrown on the dark sky aren't well done, and the pencil lines are too obvious, even after blending with a piece of tissue paper and with my blender in some parts. 

I had done the ghoul, his pet wolf-dog and their little hill of skulls first, and, as always, the blank background stared back at me, melting away much of my patience. I think I was in too much of a hurry to finish it, after the subjects in the foreground had sat there half finished for a couple of weeks. It was a busy period at home and at work.

The ghoul: I settled easily on making him a shade of dull green, since he's "undead". Again, Rosanes' shadow shading helped me greatly in where to go with a deeper green or even French grey to denote shadows.

The wolf dog: I wanted it to be a dark, dark grey, nearly black, so that the red/vermillion eyes would pop.

The tree: This took a while, with all the gnarliness in deep brown to offset the paler brown of the trunk. I had wanted to make the lone apple on the branch red, but since I already gave Mr Ghoul a scarlet loin cloth, I didn't want to repeat the color. So this became a granny smith tree!

The roots, among which sat all those skulls, took a while, and I was running out of patience, because doing it pretty much restricted my palette to browns, greys and black. The skulls were done easily enough.

Then... the background, my nemesis. With ghouls being creatures of the night, it had to be a night sky, and the inspiration came to me to draw in a blood moon. With its deep red hue, such a moon would add to the spookiness of the scene. I looked up the Internet for pictures of blood moons for inspiration, and built my palette from there. I layered several reds, oranges and deep greys, and left the lower right quadrant a paler yellow for some variation. I had to tone down the moon with a deep grey overall, because it looked too red to be believable.

It still looked all right at this stage. Things went south only when I attempted the sky, especially the part around the moon.  For the sky to the right of the picture, I applied three shades of deep blue - the ultramarine, indanthrone, dioxazine purple - then deepened the top of the picture with 90% cool grey to darken it.

I put a layer of orange round the edges of the moon, and then introduced lilac, blending the edges to try to get the gradation smooth. The plan had been to make the lilac morph into blue through shading to join up with the rest of the sky, but, as you can see, the blending didn't go according to plan and just looks Plain Wrong. Because the colors at this point seemed too bright, I brought in my deep grey again to mute it down, but that too, didn't go well.

The rim lighting: The trusty white gel pen came in useful here for the silvery threads of bright white where the ghoul, wolf-dog and tree catch the moonlight.

Maybe I should have done a regular yellow moon. Might have been less demanding and not required so many colors. 

Unicorn from the Mythomorphia coloring book

I believe most unicorns depicted in popular culture are white and come with magical rainbow-colored horns. Meet this, a gold/brown unicorn with a flaming red mane and a horn that seems to be a part of a silver armor!  Since no one has ever seen a unicorn, these colors can't be wrong, can they?

I did an online search of color pencil artists' renditions of this drawing from Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia book, and yes, most did the unicorn in white.  I had meant to do the same  - it would have been an exercise in creating the illusion of white. Such a unicorn would probably have entailed using various shades and layers of yellow, pale blues, pale greens and greys to make the animal look white.

But I started with a pale cream around the eyes, and before I knew it, the face was too brown/cream-colored to make it a white horse already. Ooops. So gold/brown this thing came to be.

Oh yes, before I go further, I need to note here that this drawing was done using my tin box of 72  Derwent Coloursoft pencils for a change. After months of using my Prismacolor (set of 150), I found the Derwent pencils nowhere as soft and easy to blend or even lay down as a first color. I wonder why.

Back to this unicorn drawing: Online renditions of this drawing by Rosanes' mostly went with blood-red roses; some had lurid colors on the headgear, like brilliant blue... To be contrarian, I picked blush pink and dusty lavender for the roses for a softer look, and after doing the gold for Anubis (see post here), I made this one an exercise in rendering silver.

The roses: Rosanes' ink shading made the roses a cinch to do. Darker pinks and lavenders went into the lined shadows, with the paler shades of pinks and lavenders on the parts of the blooms facing the light.

The silver armor: From reading Alyona Nickelsen's Colored Pencil Painting Bible (a worthwhile investment if you want to learn the finer points of rendering ice, glass, water, wood, flora/fauna, metal, gems and jewellery!), the tip I picked up was that to convey the illusion of shiny metal, the darkest values and lightest ones have to sit right next to each other, with little or no grading between.

It is really much more complicated than that, for Nickelsen also delves into how to create the reflections of objects on silver. Here, I simplified it by not drawing in any reflections. The unicorn's headgear was assumed to be isolated from any surrounding objects, hence the broad bands of pure, bright white against 90% grey or sheer black on the metal and the horn. I hope it looks believably silver nonetheless.

A horse this majestic could have done with a more generous mane, I thought. And with red being my favourite hair color, I went with that, using pale yellow and my white gel pen for the highlights.

The scattered gems around the unicorn were quickly done. Most of them were done using a jewel tone - a strong green, blue or red - with a dark grey pencil for depth around the edges, and my trusty white gel pen for highlights.

Coloring in the background: Matthew Vaughn (Instagram handle manlycoloring) does awesome backgrounds with his pencils. And from his WIPs, it looks like he does them first. When the colors are done right, backgrounds do make the subject jump out and provide a context for them. Kudos to him!

BUT... they are a lot of work. Matt Vaughn says that because the backgrounds in most coloring books are blank, they are a great canvas for the imagination. True. But it is still a lot of work! And after I have colored in a picture, especially a double-spread one, I'm too pooped to think of filling in that expanse. Matt Vaughn does show the possibilities though.

I am dropping the idea of doing the background for the unicorn, and have moved on to my next picture.

My mum-in-law asked me an existential question the other day: So after you are done coloring this picture, what then? I was floored for a moment. "I don't do anything with them," I replied. "My pictures aren't good enough to sell!" Coloring is an end in itself to me. I take breaks between pictures to draw my own pictures, like I did with Marutaro here, the carnations and the carousel horse. No immediate plans for another!