Brotherly Love part 3: Bringing Tonji to life!

Hi folks, today's installment will focus on the process of bringing Tonji to life. One of the elements that attracted me to paint this scene was the juxtaposition of Tonji's laziness to Tombo's patience with his brother. The challenge that Tonji presented was that he had his eyes closed. One of my specialties is bringing my subject to life through the eyes so without that element to work with I had to come up with other means.

I started with the lightest sections of his brow, paying close attention to the textures and highlighting the wrinkles around his closed eyes. at the same time I began the job of modelling Tombo's rear leg.

For Tonji's jaw and snout I used my white substitutes; pale violets, ultramarine blue, australian grey and warm white. The darkest tones were a combination of flinders blue and red violets along with pilbara red for zing. The subtle highlight on his lip was done using a mid blue grey lightly applied to blend with the base tone.

The modelling on tombo's leg was started using my light sienna and umber tones, both raw and burnt. I applied the pastel using the broad side of the stick very lightliy to allow the paper to play its part in achieving the look I wanted. Many more layers would follow on from this but i gave me a solid base to build on.

With the first layer of Tombo's leg completed I used the same collection of tones to build his body, working loosely at this stage to lay in the wrinkles.

Brotherly Love part 2: Building the mane

Painting a lion's mane is a very arduos task taking many layers and tones to create a worthwhile effect. With Tonji's mane I worked with a limited palette and many fine strokes layed lightly one over the other to build depth. When working in pastel I find that a soft touch is very beneficial as it allows me a great scope for detail.

In the following photo you can see how i've used those strokes to build the textures and work with the strong light.

With Tonji's mane under control fot the time being I moved back over to Tombo and began sculpting his paw. The thing I learned while working on these boys was that if I left one of them for too long they got impatient.

Lets get started! Brotherly Love part 1: laying out and establishing the lights

Hi folks, I'm going to kick off this blog with a demonstration of a pair of lions I photographed while at Werribee Open Range Zoo. Lions are known to be prodigious sleepers, spending most their days napping. These boys were just waking up in preparation of being fed at 12 noon. What I loved about this scene was the counterplay between them.

The size of the work is 470mm x 670mm on Colourfix paper by Art Spectrum. The pastels that I use are a variety of brands including Art Spectrum, Winsor & Newton and Rembrandt. My collection contains over 600 pastels. Most pastellists tend to have huge collections as different brands offer slighlty different qualities in softess and tones.

When starting a work like this I will normally do a few layout sketches in pencil to get a feel for composition and to help me better understand my subject. For this piece I did a finished pencil study of one of the lions to establish his personality.

Here is the study..."Tombo"
Coloured pencil and graphite on bristol board

With the study completed I then moved onto the colourfix, producing the layout using pastel pencil. At the layout stage I put in a grid which allows me to place focal points at the optimum positions.

Being left handed I work from right to left to avoid smudging my work. Therefore I started with the background first. By establishing the background this gives me a tonal key to base the rest of the work on. once i had blocked in the first section I moved onto the body of Tonji, the rear lion and placed the highlights for his mane and back. While using my light tone I also layed in the forelegs of Tombo, the front lion.

Once the lights are blocked in I use flinders red violet (darkest tone) to establish contrast. I very rarely use black in any of my work preferring instead to use coloured darks.
I also lay in the first layer of the foreground grasses.

In the next installment I will take you through the first stages of building the lions.

If you'd like to see the finished work go to wildatart.mosaicglobe and look in the gallery.

Welcome to the Wild @ Art blog!

Hi, my name is Leigh Rust and here I will share with you my tips and techniques for painting wildlife. I am an Australian based wildlife artist who has been working in pastel for 6 years. I am a member of the Australian Guild of Realist Artists and the founder of the Untamed Artists Network.
For the past couple of years I have been at the forefront of posting WIP's (Works in progress) on the various forums at wetcanvas.com. Using this blog I am going to take my WIP's and put them into easy to read demonstrations which will give both the artists and buyers a unique insight as to what it takes to create a work of art.

If you have any questions relating to working in pastel or wildlife please dont hesitate to ask!