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 Big Kitty
by Patrick J. Reynolds
Click on any of Patrick’s artwork
for a closer look!
It is said that the eye of the artist is only explained by the artist . When
I started this piece, the subject was to have a powerful, majestic look about him,
however, as the painting evolved, with the many
fall leaves and the relaxing atmosphere surrounding him, it seemed more
appropriate to give him that “ I’ve just eaten, leave me alone”
look. The goal here is to capture the onlooker for a moment and allow for
a justified gazing period and bring you on a mental tour of the entire
painting, a sort of “mental massage," something that cannot be
brought forth by conventional “growling cat” paintings.
I started off with a pencil study of the cat, using this method, I am able
to have much more control over how I will structure the painting.
Normally, this is done three or four times as I am rarely satisfied with
the first draft. Care is taken to not leave out any important details, the
one mistake most artists make is poor planning, you don’t want to be
experimenting with the layout after you are underway. Using a pencil and
eraser, I have the ability to explore the textures I want in the
appropriate places. Here there are no rules, I use my fingers a lot to
“smudge” the lead around giving the piece a softer appearance. In
contrast to the soft smudges and fades I break out the erasers, all kinds
of them, electric ones, hard ones, soft ones, they all have a special
purpose, and it’s important to be able to exploit their every
characteristic.
Here is where I get on my wife’s nerves, I call her into the studio and ask
if she thinks I should change
anything! After that, I ask several of my friends if they would change
anything. After I have thoroughly aggravated everyone to distraction, I
then make a decision to move on to the next step.
- Here I use a technique that I have always felt safe with, it’s called the
wash. You can apply a wash with either a brush or an airbrush, I usually
use both. First I make my base color, using mixtures of black, white,
yellow, and brown. The black and white are used simply to get the value
right, then the yellow is added slowly to pull out brightness, I call
yellow the color of life, because just about every land based living
organism has yellow somewhere In it. finally brown is added to give it
depth. Before applying the color to the canvas, I made sure that the color
was very thin, for two reasons, one it’s easy to erase two you can add
color, but it’s hard to remove it once it’s applied. After the wash is
dry, again I use the erasers to bring the details back up. It’s not hard
to find yourself adding more paint than need be, so I have to constantly
monitor paint viscosity. Com Art was the paint I used to make this wash,
it has a lot of pigment so just a little did the trick!
- Over the years, I have learned a good pallet for painting wild life, the best
way to master this is to try to match live animal fur as opposed to
photographs. Photo’s lie! There is a huge difference in the way the
human eye sees photos versus the real thing. So when ever possible, use a
live subject or reasonable replacement, obviously I didn’t bring a live
mountain lion into my studio, so I visited the zoo. I studied the cats
expressions, mannerisms, and
of course color. Mainly, I noted how light passes through the fur, and
bounces off it. The mountain lion has a coarse fur with little to no
shine, and it changes color as it reaches the tip of every hair! Not an
easy task, if you are an absolute realist. So thank God I’m not! I use a
technique called gesturing. This dictates that I can use the proper colors
and just enough detail to fool the eye. So here you can see that I simply
started to pull in individual hairs with a brush in white, and only white.
This made for a good foundation of fur which will be dealt with later. Now you can see that I have completely covered the subject with individual
hairs I can move on to more fun stuff!
- Here I have placed the first layer of color over the white hairs. Wow,
what a difference! But there’s more, much much more.
- I now do the whole process again!, this time placing more emphases on the
lighter areas.
- The tree branch was one of the most frustrating things in the whole painting.
But it turned into the most fun. It
was done by first spraying gold and letting it fully dry. Then I sprayed
dark brown and black heavily, and if you have an Iwata Eclipse, you know
how heavy you can get! While the paint was still wet, I used a piece of
saran wrap to place over and onto the wet paint, then pulling the plastic
at both ends, causing wrinkles, then lifting it. Sounds disgusting? Well
it was, it looked pathetic. But it came to be much better when I got my
pallet knife and scraped the canvas to achieve a bark look. Then I took
individual pieces of bark and highlighted and shadowed them until I had a
believable piece. Sounds easy, but I spent about two days of experimenting.
- Now I went back into the fur one more time!
- Here you can see how I made sure that the hairs where pointing in the right
direction.
- This time I added some darker tones to give the kitty some depth, I wanted
the top of the head to fall back into the painting more than the rest of him.
- Here I added some warmer hues to liven thing up a bit, I couldn’t wait
for this part to get here!
- The background was painted to not take anything away from the cat, but at the
same time, not take anything away from the setting of the painting. I
began by covering the entire background with a neutral warm base, then
with soft loose lines inadvertently throwing in to the mix vines and
branches with a darker color. The actual color here is really not
important because of atmospheric distortion, this can be of any cooler
hue. The leaves
for instance tell you that it is early fall, and it is probably early in
the morning, hence the dew drops! I wanted to convey a mood of relaxation,
putting the viewer in a place where it is most likely fairly cool. The
highlight of the whole background is the leaf hanging down with the light
shining through it. I got real pleasure out of pulling this off! First I
painted the back half of the leaf with
toned down browns and yellows, adding reflections from the sun. On the
other side of the leaf, or the illuminated side, I used full value yellows
and browns to give it brilliancy.
Further back in the background is more leaves and branches out of focus, Done
almost exclusively with the airbrush because of the extreme control you
can achieve without any thought. I could apply more of my efforts to
creativity rather than the technical aspects. but more importantly their
value has dropped as they go back. I was careful not to use black at full
strength as this has a tendency to kill a painting! The reason is that the
human eye usually recognizes about seven values per eye full. So keep this
in mind for your next painting.
 Speaking of eyes, the one thing I believe an artist should concentrate the most on
is the eyes of the subject you are painting. Here I knew the light source
would do several things, It would both cast a shadow on and reflect off
the eye ball of my subject. To take advantage of this I added some baby
blue that I mixed using white, blue, and a tad of brown to reflect the
sky. Draping down you’ll see lines which are nothing more than shadows
from the delicate lashes of the eyelid. It’s very important to know how
light plays inside an eyeball, in short, light enters the eye on one side
but illuminates the other side. This is best illustrated by studying
raindrops. Note that I use a simple technique utilizing the freehand
stencil, this is an invaluable tool that should be in every artists
arsenal this one is made by Artool, I
find the right size circle to make the outer part of the eye. Then a
smaller circle to illustrate the pupil.
After a few small added details, and points of interests such as the lady bug I
added (so the sales people at the gallery could have something to point
out to gazing customers and use as a sales tool) I then went on to apply
on coat of Damar clear to protect it from small scratches during transportation.
The finished piece is then framed and shot in a professional photography
studio and then prints are made of it, where it is then sold on the market
for about $250 per limited edition print, (Edition size is 950) the
original is then priced at $8500.00.
Hope this helps in some way to lead you effortlessly down the road to success
in fine art! And as always happy airbrushing!
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