Pachydream and Zebraverse - dream animals in pastels

My painting of the psychedelic squirrel sparked a new awakening in me. Apparently my soul yearns to draw animals in technicolour, I just never knew it until now. I was eager to start a new piece right away, but when you decide you want to interprete a photo reference instead of just copying from it, painting now requires a little more thought.

There was one thing that bugged me: I said I wanted to draw animals in technicolour, but in the squirrel drawing, the squirrel technically wasn't colourful, just the background and the tree. That is like saying I love hot fudge sundaes, and then asking the McDonald's auntie to hold the hot fudge. 

So I decided I would draw the next animal using a rainbow palette. Over the weekend, I pulled out my soft pastels, and turned out two drawings. The first was an elephant on Canson Mi-Teintes dark paper.

By the way, in case you're wondering why I always show the final drawing right up front in my posts and hence, kinda spoil the ending of the story, there's a technical reason - the first image gets picked up as the thumbnail in social media, so it makes sense for me to post the best image first.

Back to the story: When I first decided to draw the elephant from this reference photo, I was quite stumped as to how to approach it. I knew I wanted to make it colourful, but I couldn't even figure out what colours to choose, let alone imagine the placement of the colours.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm going to let you in on my secret. Basically, I got the idea to run the image through Google's Deep Dream Generator. If you don't know what that is, it's a programme that simulates the styles of images to create AI art that looks pretty surreal. So no, I'm not a genuis who just instinctively knew how to create this elephant on LSD. I used a hack. What I got was this. I thought, "Wow! That looks pretty cool!" and it gave me some idea of the sort of colours that could work well together.

 

First, I blocked in the underlayers with Panpastels, then I tried filling in some of the areas with soft pastels. I took a photo at this point of the painting to show that by this stage, I was completely lost. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and it felt like I was just picking up random pastels. I didn't know how I was going to tie all the colours together, it felt overwhelming.

I decided to just focus on one area at a time instead of trying to fill in colours all over the place. Gradually, it dawned on me that the reason I was getting confused was that I was trying to follow two images at the same time - both the original reference and the AI-generated one. So I discarded the latter and just focused on the original, following shadows and light like how I did for my previous paintings. The difference now is that instead of following the colours on the image, I substituted them with bright hues.

There's a learning curve to painting like this. Once I realised that I had to follow the value (level of light and dark) instead of the colour, a lightbulb switched on in my head. You know the funny thing about paintings? In the end, the colour really doesn't matter as much as the value. Artists say this all the time and I finally understood it now. If I wanted to colour in a darkened shadow area, it really didn't matter too much whether I pick a dark purple or a dark blue or a dark green. The important thing is to make sure it's dark enough.

By this stage of the painting, I was feeling pretty good. 

Incidentally, this is my new setup which I'm experimenting with. It allows me to draw directly in front of my monitor, and the newspaper hopefully catches all the pastel dust.

Finally, the painting was done. It didn't take that long actually, half a day, because I didn't have to draw the background. It was also the first time I've drawn to the edge of the paper. I like the effect a lot.

Buoyed by the results, the next day, I decided to draw a zebra from a black-and-white reference photo.

Photo: Jan Boss

I thought, "Wouldn't it be funny if the zebra was in colour and the background was not!" (I often have paradoxical thoughts like that). So I set out to paint the zebra in bright hues and the background in shades of grey. Just to see what it would be like. I started with the greys first.

Following my experiene with the elephant, I felt that I now had a better inkling of how colour works, and needn't follow a Deep Dream-generated image. I mean, it's a great way to get ideas and inspiration, but the whole point of developing one's style is to keep it original. I don't want to move from copying photos to copying AI art! That's would be too depressing for words. 

I decided to keep it simple with just three colour tones - blue, purple and pink. Here, I've completed the grassy background and blocked in the colours.

 

Zebras are complicated because you have to make sure the stripes are in the right place first. It got fiddly with the fat pastel sticks, and the dark areas kept muddying into the light areas. And then I discovered that my darkest pastels were not dark enough to create the contrast I wanted. (Did I just give myself an excuse to buy more pastels?)

Here, the head's done and I thought its head and neck look quite disjointed with the two different colours.

I made more adjustments and attempted to make the transition more seamless, by adding some purples to the blue parts and adding blue bits to the pink parts. Yeah, complex. I didn't like the painting very much up close, but as it often happens, when I look at it from a distance, it looks better.

Here's the final artwork. I call it Zebraverse - a zebra in a reverse universe. It's a funny effect, and I wouldn't say it's the prettiest painting I've ever done, but I think it makes a statement about where you choose to see colour in life.

The past few days have been a huge milestone for me. I know friends might roll my eyes when I say this, but this was the first time that I truly felt I could call myself an artist. Before this, I always had this feeling that I was merely a good copier. But these two paintings are different - they express a viewpoint and give voice to the way I see God's creation, and to me, that's what art is all about. 

So far, this art journey has been filled with surprises, and I've stopped trying to make predictions on where it will head next. I'm just going to let my art evolve and enjoy it as much as I can.