My Art Journal

WOW! That elephant is spectacular!!!

Your art is absolutely amazing!!! I really enjoyed looking through :)

Another one - a lion at our local zoo

Stunning as always!

Lovely work Katey, not too many people work in pastels though my son is really keen on them as he's never really enjoyed working with paint.
Interesting to see how you build up the layers - not sure if I could work from left to right like that as I'm more for building up the whole thing layer on layer - not easy to do with anything that smudges.
Most colleges now insist on students working from real life and not imagination - my son is majoring in animation and they weren't at all interested in seeing portfolios that had anything drawn from imagination in which isnt what you'd expect but the reasoning is sound.
So many talented artists on this forum.

I hope your son continues with pastels, Jaydee. They are a wonderful medium to work in, tricky, but wonderful.

I tend to vary how I work depending on the piece I'm doing. I generally work in my base layers until the piece is covered and recognisable, then put in the detail. For fur work, I will usually go left to right to avoid smudging, but sometimes the layout of a subject won't allow for that, so I work in sections.

Interesting that your son's work is being knocked. I had the opposite problem at school - granted it was a number of tears ago! - my teachers did not like that I worked from reality and enjoyed portraying photo realism rather than imaginative 'arty' work.
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I love his floppy ear and the fur is simply amazing, how perfectly you have captured the feel of it. May I ask how big it is (in inches if you please) and how long it took you?

It is approx 12x16", and only took me 7 hours
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Only 7. Oh, I thought it took a long time. (I am being fascetious)

Actually him getting knocked back was the best thing that could have happened as it made him step up to the mark and do what his teachers had been telling him for 2 years. By the next portfolio session he attended his work had improved 100% because he was seeing real depth in working from actual subject and not his imagination
He was able to get into one of the top US colleges for animation with a good scholarship - he mostly works in pencil now but the real focus at this stage is in producing CGI images - which of course have to have depth, he now sees that the aim is to turn reality into fantasy - you can't just start with fantasy