Creation Process!

Hey friends! So I often get asked about my creation process, and I wanted to post here with some photos of my process with this recent dove commission painting.

I’ll keep doing this for new pieces in the future, and I can go into more detail about the materials I use and the time it takes, as well as what some of the paintings symbolically mean to me!

This piece in particular combines a few visual tropes I love to use in my work, halos and eyes. I frequently borrow religious iconography in my work as a way of re centering the importance of living animals as essential figures in the ecosystems of our world. I use the halo visually as a way to speak to their roll as unwilling martyrs in the destruction of the natural world, and the sacred nature of wild creatures and wild places.

Eyes in my work represent the Third Eye or Inner Eye concept, the eye that has True Sight and can see beyond the mortal or material plane, beyond the illusions of separation.

Initial Sketch

I start every piece with a graphite sketch, building up forms loosely until I have the composition that I want! I sketch using a mechanical pencil, and sometimes a 2H prismacolor scholar pencil. I only sometimes work from reference, for most creatures I can draw them from memory, unless I need a unique pose. In this case I combined two reference images of the pet pigeon this piece is based on to get the pose and features right, and I drew the wings from memory.

Cleaning up the sketch

Once I have the rough composition sketched out, I start to clean up the sketch, erasing the rougher lines and filling in finer details. This is the stage that comes before I start inking, and where I finalize the large composition blocks

Inking

Once I’m done with the graphite sketch I start inking over the graphite lines using ballpoint pen, I use a Zebra airfit brand pen with fine point refills. I use ballpoint for most of my pieces, and occasionally micron pen as well! As I ink I also intensify areas of shadow, and add in more details as I go. I erase the graphite from under the ink afterwards.

Watercolor layers

After I erase the graphite from under the ink, I start watercolor washes, starting with my base colors. You can see here I decided to start with the background, since I knew that this pigeon was going to be white. I knew I wanted the halo to be a luminous warm tone, so I started with a mixture of yellow and orange, washed out at first with more water than pigment, then building up color density closer to the head. I faded out the edges by adding in more water, knowing that I would be coming back in with darker blues and purples around it.

More Watercolor Layers

I build up my watercolors in layers, using thin washes and letting the white of the paper serve as the highlights and luminosity. I build up color density slowly in these layers, adding in one color at a time and letting the layers create color depth! In this case after the orange paint dried, I started a thin wash of cerulean blue, then added in layers of purple, then black. with each layer I intensified the level of pigment I mixed in, so when I got to the bottom corners with the black and purple paint the color was much darker than near the top or around the orange halo at the bird’s head, where I watered down my pigments much more. I paint primarily on Strathmore cold press watercolor paper.

Final Details

After all of the watercolor washes have been layered on, I use colored pencil and sometimes spots of acrylic paint to add smaller highlights, glow effects, or areas of more intense color. In this case the red tear drop halo was painted over the top of the watercolor in red acrylic.