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.