Dream of the Red Panda

Irrelevant fact: the title is a play on the Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber. Here's my pastel painting of a red panda having dreams of Spring. Kinda appropriate since Chinese New Year is coming up. This is on white Velour paper.

I'll be honest, I'm not crazy about the background. When I started, I thought I would create a psychedelic sky. Since the panda was going to be red/orange/yellow, I thought I would use the complementary colours of green and blue. 

Round 1: After attempting these random strokes, I decided I hated the effect, except for that flower motif thingy on the bottom left corner.

Round 2: I retsrated, continuing with the flower motif for the rest of the background but in pink, since pink flowers are very symbolic for Chinese New Year. Kept dithering between whether to do geometric shapes or not, resulting in this chaos of indecision.

Round 3: Decided to go for a bokeh background instead, so tried to make the pink flowers more defined. By then, the paper is already pretty saturated, so the pink went on dirty and I couldn't get the brightness I wanted. What a mess. 

By this time, it's 1am in the morning and I'm all ready to rage quit, so I abandoned the painting and went to bed. The next day, I decided to leave the background and move on to the red panda. I used mostly Jack Richeson pastels since I know from experience that I won't be able to do details with pastels any softer than these.

It was only when I moved on to the face that I started feeling better about this painting. I love drawing animal faces, especially the eyes. That's always when the painting comes to life for me.

It does look very sweet, doesn't it. My daughter said it reminded her of Master Shifu in Kungfu Panda looking exhausted when Po bothers him. Oh yeah, Master Sifu is a red panda!

When the panda was finally completed, I eyed the background once more and decided to make one last attempt to salvage it. I used Unison pastels to brighten the pink as best as I could, and now there's no mistaking that these are truly pink flowers. 

It's still not great, but it'll do. 

Note: this is my first time using white Velour paper. I don't like it as much as the mid-tone versions as I can't see the white markings properly, but the advantage is that the background colour doesn't alter the pastel colours.

花开富贵!