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Saturday, November 28, 2009

toomai studies

Yep, more elephants.

These are studies for the Toomai picture I'm currently working on. Kali Nag is the star of the show, and I wanted to give him a distinct personality. Also Indian elephants are different than African elephants--smaller ears, two humps on the head instead of one--something I never particularly paid that much attention to before. Also Indian elephants sometimes have these spots, sort of freckles on their trunks and ears, and I decided to give him these markings.





The Tiger.

In the story, there's a brief mention of Kali Nag batting an attacking wounded tiger away with his head. This is a sort of flashback, and through most of the story he's a very old elephant, and I thought this was a good opportunity to focus on what a bad ass he once was. This was also an opportunity to expand on an image that wasn't very detailed in the prose. I had to figure out tiger anatomy, and so I did a few studies to get a better sense of it so I could put the tiger in action. I found some actual footage of a tiger attacking an elephant rider on Youtube which was helpful. I also have an excellent book on animal anatomy, Goldfinger's Animal Anatomy for artists.





6 comments:

  1. Beautiful Animal studies....cannot wait to see the final colored piece..love the inked layout below! Marvelous!! :)

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  2. Thanks Tin. Color adds a lot of volume. In the process of scanning in new watercolor textures this weekend, so I hope to put it together soon.

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  3. That's some beautiful and elegant line work, Jed.

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  4. Tiger faces are great! Did you do screen captures of the youtube video for reference? The one in the middle is really cool.

    I don't "get" life drawing / anatomy. It's like Shakespeare to me, I just don't get what the appeal is, to draw it or to study it or to admire it. Only if a figure is truly unique, like Dali's Crucifix painting or something like that. only then do I sit up and take notice of "the human form". I much prefer the elephants and tigers! I'm just rambling here, not suggesting or requesting that you switch gears. I know I'm some crazy weirdo who does not appreciate figure drawings like normal people do.

    Nice job on the studio! How long does it last? When I give my studio a good sprucing up like that, it takes about a month for chaos to reclaim it.

    See ya!

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  5. basically it comes down to this, Mark: I just want to learn how to draw people good. I don't really put much value on the figure drawings themselves. It's all practice to me. Not that I don't appreciate a good figure drawing or painting! I'm totally down. But these are just exercises.

    The animals are a good time though. Most of this stuff is invented from a bunch of different images, but I did have some very helpful screen captures of the Youtube video. The video fortunately ends before the tiger actually makes contact with the guy, and I don't want to know what happened to him. Coloring the bigger scene (finished inks on a previous post) at the moment.

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