Portrait of Taz: Starting Dark, and The Eyes Have It

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Hey, I'm back , and the cat came back with me! (We'll get back to the bear in a minute). When last we saw Taz, I had lain in the basic colors and was starting to work on defining the shapes of his features and his markings. In the next phase, I decided to start with the darkest colors and work from dark to light, because there were two advantages to that: As I've said before, I always work from back to front, adding layers on top, and Taz's whiskers and tongue, which are very light, are clearly on top of everything else. You will note when looking at the reference photo, that the dark areas look larger than they should be. No worries -- I've painted them larger on purpose because they will be covered by lighter and lighter tones, and I wanted to ensure that the darks are firmly established where they need to be. The other advantage of working dark-to-light is that the light source in this picture is clearly on the right, so it also enables me to work from left to right - an advantage, because I am right-handed and usually work on artwork like that. There are far greater areas of dark on the left-hand side of Taz, graduating toward lighter colors on the right, where the light is hitting the side of his head. At this point, though, I wanted to scratch the itch of getting something on the picture developed fully. Unlike Taz's tongue and whiskers, his eyes didn't have to wait to be painted later on top of anything - they were separate features unto themselves. So I went ahead and finished them completely, with the full color range and the bright highlight. It's nice to see at least part of the painting done completely -- the background is done, but since it's the background, it's not done in a detailed fashion. The eyes are, so it really gives a sense that the portrait is coming along. That's good, because I really do have quite a lot more to do on it, as you'll see.