Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Time To Monkey Around

The year of the monkey is just around the corner.  It's time to do a little monkey business.

I dabbled in painting a rabbit when it was the year of the Rabbit.  When it was the year of the snake, I tried to paint snakes just for the heck of it, practicing my center tip technique (see Snakes, Just for Fun , Feb 23, 2013 blog).   I think the idea of me painting the animal of the year sort of took hold with the year of the horse.  It is a challenge now to try to keep this going.

I started out by researching photos on the net and tried to compose poses based on them and sketched them out to see the possibilities.


I tried to paint with more details to see what works


And tried to try some gazes

 
The facial expression was a difficult task.  I didn't want the painting to appear cartoonish, nor did I want it to be stoic and cold.  I forgot how many muscles are there to control our facial expressions, suffice to say regardless of the number I was not able to replicate any of them with my brush.  The things that I could try though were the relative positions of the eyes, the brow and the attitude of the head. 
 
 That's it.  Body language!
 
 
 
 
 At some point I thought the images were more like drawings than brush strokes, so I also tried my luck with more emphasis on brush strokes
 
 
 I was really having a difficult time.  I kept vacillating between the 2 different styles.  A major part of the indecision was due to my very limited experience of the subject matter and either way I would be treading in new waters.
 
I need to extricate myself from this for a little while and see if I could find a fresh approach.
 



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