I have done a rat painting before for the Year of the Rat. I had a rat climbing over a red square Fai Chun with the Chinese word "Blessings" written on it. Obviously the tone was to show the coming year as an auspicious one because the person in charge, the Rat, has found blessings. My emphasis was also on the posing of the rat, being cute and all that, finding a ledge to clamber onto the piece of paper with writing on it.
For this family zodiac project, I am hoping to pose my Rat in an appealing light; smart and inquisitive. My rat is not going to be timid or secretive. My rat is poised to explore, to sniff out the surroundings; showing confidence and ready to accept a caressing on the head. Definitely not something you want to vilify. Perhaps I am reminiscing about the white mice that my son kept when he was little.
Painting this rat is pretty straight forward. I am roughing in a general shape of the animal, paying attention to where I want the eye to be at. They say the eyes are the windows to a person's soul, the same applies to the rat. If I can paint the eyes successfully, then nothing else matters.
Using pink to denote the ears and the digits and the nose helps to give reference to the different body parts. Small dabs of Chinese White bring out the highlighted areas. Once the mouth is defined, I have the posture of my rat nailed.
Filling in the eye and adjusting for dark values make my rat more "real"?
Putting on whiskers and starting to grow hair on the body of my rodent.
A tiny dab of white becomes the catchlight on the eyeball, and makes all the difference to the spirit of the animal. It really feels alive now.
Moving on to the next featured character in this project, the baby ox. I am going to model my ox with the head turned back, to give it movement.
I am lightly sketching out the animal with a pencil, delineating darker values with an ink brush along the way. This helps me to form a better three dimensional picture of my subject.
I am going to color with my Tea color from a tube this time, and not from my tea cup as I inadvertently did before.
I am using Chinese White to help with the highlights again. Just as I was abscessed with the sternocleidomastoid muscle of Rusalka when I painted her, I am intrigued by Achilles tendons of the ox and I am trying to document them.
My baby ox has a little attitude. My ox has a tongue sticking out of the mouth. Could be a playful gesture, could be a satisfying suckling. Either way it adds interest to a otherwise stoic, academic interpretation of the zodiac animals.
