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.